Ideas can emerge out of the plot and out of the conversations among the characters. We'll see all of those next time. One of Cole Porter's silliest musicals is Anything Goes . The play makes fun of the superficiality and stupidity of the American rich in the 1920's. Even plays like The Music Man have ideas.
Films express ideas in some unexpected ways.
Yet, by the time the boat sinks it has come to represent privilege and pride and we are oddly glad to see it go down. We really know that the hero and the heroine could not maintain their love in the carefully class-regulated world represented by the ship. The Brig by Kenneth H. Brown was a play created for one of America's great avant garde theatres, The Living Theatre, in 1963. The play was created to communicate the idea of oppression, using as its central image a US marine brig or jail. The entire play takes place within the confines of this one room jail and the experience is truly harrowing.