Tom Foreman’s play, Boiler Room Six, tells the story of Frederick Barrett, stoker on the Titanic. It’s 1912, and work in the boiler room is tough, hot, and unrelenting.
With a tour starting at the Pleasance, London, before a full run this summer at the Edinburgh Fringe, Boiler Room Six is a one-man show of unusual intensity.
Charlie Sheepshanks returns to the role he first played in 2024. It is a brilliantly judged performance bringing not just Barrett but his fellow stokers and trimmers to life.
Natalia Izquierdo is in charge of the atmospheric lighting, smoke and sound effects. On such a small stage you need to be completely convinced by the setting, especially in a cabaret table setting like this venue.
Boiler Room Six keeps you on the edge of your seat. You know the ending – Titanic sinks, Barrett survives – but the little details Foreman brings to both script and direction enhance the well-worn material.
A family story that Barrett was in fact Foreman’s great-great grandfather spurred the creation of the play, although this connection has not been verified – there were two Frederick Barretts on the ship. What matters is that Barrett, a Titanic survivor, is remembered.
We first see him testifying at an inquiry into the sinking, then back in Boiler Room Six on an ordinary day, stoking the furnaces, at a card game, hard-working and hard-playing.
The mood shifts quickly. A furnace fire, a leak that quickly turns catastrophic. A choice to remain and keep the ship afloat, or take a chance up on deck with all the others. Foreman’s script is very visual; Sheepshanks’s performance very physical.
Taken together, the cabaret setting melts away as the production unfolds. Just an hour, but so tightly constructed and briskly directed, we could be with Barrett as he seeks to save the furnaces and, eventually, himself.
On each level of the ship, those small moments make Boiler Room Six a clear commemoration of the human cost of pride and commercialism. The family from a foreign land clinging to their suitcases. The passengers with their pastor in a grotesque last rites.
Up on deck, amid the chaos, confusion and compassion, Barrett still stops to notice the ornate chandeliers in the lounges as the ship’s orchestra plays “Nearer My God To Thee”. He also notes a father holding his daughter for the last time before she joins a lifeboat.
The colleagues Barrett recalls were real: inexperienced Albert White, not yet 18; Jonathan Shepherd, engineer; George Beauchamp, also in lifeboat 13; Joseph Bell, chief engineer.
Boiler Room Six is a remarkable achievement in fringe theatre, and proves what can be produced when all the elements slot into place.
It’s 5 stars from me.
Boiler Room Six is at the Pleasance on 11 Apr and then on tour until 18 Jul.
Photo credit: Tom Foreman