Titanic

No, this is not the stage version of the Oscar-winning Kate Winslet/Leonardo DiCaprio film, but a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical that opened in New York in the same year of the movie release in 1997. Now, some 16 years later, it is crossing the Atlantic to finally open in London. It has definitely been worth the wait.

I saw the original Broadway production and I recall it as one of the greatest musical stagings I have witnessed, so the new pocket-sized edition that has come to Southwark Playhouse has a lot to live up to. But it triumphantly succeeds in creating and sustaining its own physical and aural world meticulously.

The production does not, of course, have the physical resources that its Broadway original did, but David Woodhead’s design resourcefully employs a movable staircase to become a gangway and crow’s nest as required, and also pulls off a clever trick of having the upper platform list as the ship goes down. That, of course, isn’t a spoiler alert; we all know how this story tragically ends, but the skill of the late Peter Stone’s superb book is to distil that inevitable and powerful drama through characters drawn from each class of the ship’s passengers and the ship’s management crew into people we come to know and care about.

The 20-strong company of Thom Southerland’s production also brings powerful voices to hauntingly draw out the spellbinding melodies of Maury Yeston, with male voices particularly to the fore thanks to Simon Green as the ship’s strident owner, Greg Castiglioni as its architect, and James Austen-Murray as a below-decks coal stoker. There are also lovely contributions from Oliver Hembrough, Celia Graham, Scarlett Courtney, Victoria Serra and Grace Eccle among the passengers.

A superb band under Mark Aspinall adds musical texture from a raised platform interestingly situated behind the audience, while Howard Hudson’s lighting and Cressida Carre’s musical staging defines spaces and movement with intense focus.