White Star of the North – review

Dramatising the story of the Titanic is this year's test of ingenuity for playwrights. Rosemary Jenkinson takes the lead in Belfast's forthcoming Titanic commemorations in an ambitious family saga that brings together two historical events: the ship's maiden voyage in 1912 and the signing of the Ulster Covenant by thousands of Northern Irish Unionists in opposition to Home Rule.

A widowed Protestant doctor, Robert Massey, has two motives when he decides to uproot his children from Belfast to America on board the Titanic: to save his daughter from depression and heartbreak and to extricate his teenage son Crawford from involvement in violent sectarian politics. Robert believes in benign political progress, while dabbling in Jungian dream interpretation and self-medicating with opium. An attractive but implausible character, played skittishly by Ruairi Conaghan, his scenes dominate the first hour of the play, introducing multiple themes – class conflict, religious discrimination, feminism – that hamper momentum, while the tone veers from comedy to heavy polemic.

With the shift in setting to the Titanic, Crawford emerges as the central character. Andrew Simpson sensitively portrays him as a lost soul, suffering the guilt of the survivor when he escapes from the sinking vessel on a lifeboat intended for women and children. Vilified for cowardice, he returns home to a city that now regards the Titanic as "Belfast's burning shame".

This is a complex and under-explored history that becomes dramatically unwieldy. Despite the light touch of director Des Kennedy and the abstract clarity of Ciaran Bagnall's stage set, the action and focus are clogged by Jenkinson's extensive research, much of which should have been thrown overboard.