Writer: John Mawson
Directors: Misha Crosby and John Mawson
There seem to be at least two recent movies entitled Unsinkable, one, also released this year, about the aftermath of the inquiry following the sinking of the Titanic, and another from 2020 about someone surviving life’s vicissitudes. This Unsinkable, however, by John Mawson and Misha Crosby, is not a movie after all. It’s billed rather mysteriously as an ‘audio film’ and is basically a radio drama with very good Dolby Atmos sound.
It tells the true story of a British merchant ship, the San Demetrio. While crossing the Atlantic carrying vital aviation fuel early in World War Two, it was attacked by a German cruiser, the Admiral Scheer and caught fire. So fierce was the ensuing blaze that the master, Captain Waite, fearing a fatal explosion, ordered the crew to abandon ship. Two of the ship’s three lifeboats made land, while the third, separated, remained at sea. Its sixteen men, including Second Officer Arthur Hawkins and Chief Engineer Charles Pollard, spend two freezing nights in the lifeboat before sighting once more the San Demetrio. To their surprise it has not sunk, although fire is still raging. They board the ship and, despite its being badly damaged, manage to limp back to England.
Writer John Mawson, in an online interview, says he wrote the story originally as a TV series, but was scuppered by Covid. In the course of the pandemic he reworked it as an audio drama and Unsinkable is the result, recorded remotely by a cast of 37 actors.
We are already very familiar with the problems of making a successful recording remotely, the stand-out one being Simon Evan’s tautly written Staged, starring Michael Sheen and David Tennant. The problem for writer and director John Mawson, however, is his determination to stick to his original ambitions, writing parts for some 100 characters. Those of us familiar with the exemplary playwriting of BBC Radios Three and Four will know something of the craft of writing for that medium. A small, easily identifiable central cast is essential, the writing pared down to essentials, aural clues to setting subtly employed.
One of the issues with Mawson’s script is that it’s not clear in the telling who he wants the hero to be. Is it Arthur Hawkins or the oddly voiced Pollard? Or is it the ship itself? Mawson makes much of the fact that he uses no narrator, but you can’t get away without exposition. There’s a chance of this working through his framing of events of a subsequent court case. But the device here is used so heavy-handedly that we are painfully aware that it is just that – a device. Would a judge, for example, really indulge an officer by allowing him to maunder on with such fanciful stuff as “Well within hours we were alone in the immense grey ocean?”
But a deeper problem starts when the drama attempts to bring sections of these narrated events to life. First the constant noise of warfare, crashing waves and an overblown musical score and then the Tower of Babel-like cast all shouting at one another, it becomes very hard indeed to follow what’s going on. If you’re keen on getting to grips with the plot, Wikipedia’s entry on the San Demetrio is recommended. There’s also an attempt to humanise Hawkins through an early scene in which he and his wife Maud announce they are expected a baby. It’s more of a cliché than a dramatic hook, however, and there’s little attempt to get us interested in the many other characters who appear at sea.
There’s certainly a good cast – Thomas Brodie-Sangster plays Hawkins, Brian Cox Robert Dodds, and John Malkovich a rather puzzling American who seems to turn into a distinctly languid Englishman, Chief Engineer Pollard. But the problem of the huge cast is multiplied as characters either address each other by first names or don’t use identifying names at all. Surely a basic principle of radio drama is to signal identity by deliberately overusing names?
Writer Mawson drops boat-loads of nautical terms, but fails to convince us of their authenticity in the subtle way that, say, Patrick O’Brian, makes us feel we could all find our way round a Napoleonic era ship of the line. The mercifully short episodes (one is only 22 minutes in length) tend to end on clumsy cliffhangers. “That ship! Is that …? It can’t be? Oh my sweet Jesus…” concludes Episode 2. In a production that aims for verisimilitude, no one seems to have checked for anachronisms: “Shut it!” someone regularly barks.
The story of the San Demetrio is undoubtedly a fascinating one, but Unsinkable is unlikely to convince you of this. And it’s hard to imagine how an audience will be willing to consume this. Will people really sit in front of a blank TV screen to listen to a radio play? Would it not have worked better as a podcast drama?
Unsinkable is available now from Wondery+ and other platforms.