PLAY REVIEW: Boiler Room Six: A Titantic Story ★★★★

The Titanic has been dramatised so often that it might seem there is little left to discover. Tom Foreman’s Boiler Room Six: A Titanic Story finds an ingenious way in: not through the doomed passengers in their finery, but through Frederick Barrett, the stoker who worked in the ship’s infernal depths.

Charlie Sheepshanks plays Barrett – and almost everyone around him – in a remarkable solo performance that is by turns muscular, funny and quietly devastating. A change of accent, posture or rhythm is enough to conjure another exhausted worker from the darkness. As the boiler room shifts from banter and hard graft to catastrophe, Sheepshanks’ physicality becomes almost exhausting to watch.

Foreman’s writing and direction resist spectacle. Two benches are enough. Natalia Izquierdo’s technical design does the rest, surrounding Sheepshanks with the roar of machinery, steam and sudden, terrifying darkness. When the furnaces become the only source of light, the effect is genuinely chilling.

There are moments when the sound threatens to overwhelm the storytelling, and Barrett’s personal history feels less fully realised than the extraordinary account of the sinking itself. But these are small reservations.

What lingers is the play’s humane perspective: a reminder that Titanic’s survival story was also the story of men below deck who kept working when almost everyone else was trying to escape. Foreman, Sheepshanks and Izquierdo make those unseen lives impossible to forget.