To Make Even The Titanic Disaster Seem Boring. In the watery holocaust brought to life in director James Cameron's film, steerage passengers frantically claw the locked gates that have trapped them below decks. Victims drop hundreds of feet into the sea as the ship tips over.
Survivors succumb to freezing in the icy water, their frantic cries gradually dying into silence.
The film's visceral spectacle is the polar opposite of the austere Titanic play that's coincidentally now on the boards at Invisible Theatre. Scotland Road is a mystery set some 80 years after the fiasco, when a supposed Titanic survivor surfaces on an ice floe in the North Atlantic, and it takes place not on the slowly flooding ship but in a locked interrogation center. Where the movie washes us in a torrent of Titanic images, the play's only visual links to the actual ship are a slide or two of the iceberg that ruptured the hold and a nice wooden reproduction of a shipboard deck chair. Beyond these, everything else this play reveals about the Titanic is through the spoken word. It's not enough.