Production Notes for Beyond the Breakers

Welcome to Beyond The Breakers, a show that has been in preparation for over a year, although in the making for barely a month. It is an odd fact that projects which need such a long gestation get but a comparatively short time in the furnace of creation. I suspect it’s the same in many other disciplines.

In the old days of pull and sail, and even in the further voyages of the motor and more recent boats, the same principle applied. The time taken getting to the incident dwarfs the time actually at the rescue, but it’s always the latter that seems to last twice as long in the mind. The reason for this project’s long development period is the production’s double nature. It is like two plays crammed into one: there is the documentary material and the play.

The documentary sections were produced from oral history interview, archive material and book search. This involved many trips up to North Norfolk to interview lifeboatmen, old and new, and then long hours meticulously transcribing their accounts and then editing them down into scenes; rummaging through books and newspaper accounts of past rescues and launches; and combing through the archives for details of one of the many lifeboat disasters, like that in Wells in 1880. All of these documentary sections are based on the actual words of those who were witness to the events and should have the distinct flavour of actuality. You may even hear some of the voices that helped contribute this material.

And then operating in parallel to this is a play, which I have written, with fictional characters, plot and story, although very much set in Sheringham now. It is based on the experiences as I saw them of the modern lifeboat crew and more recent events, like the removal in the early ‘90s of the Sheringham big boat, its Oakley, and replacement with a fast boat, the Atlantic. I must emphasise this “as I saw them” because, although the play too is based on those interviews and research, it has a different relationship to it. It is not actual truth but fictional truth and investigates different areas of the modern lifeboat world. It is especially difficult precisely because of its close connection with a known locality. While I interviewed men from Sheringham, and Cromer and Wells, it was the Sheringham experience that forms the meat of the play element, largely because of the town’s and the crew’s experience in relation to the change over from the ALB (All weather lifeboat) to the ILB (Inshore lifeboat). Their reaction, some immediate, some in hindsight, and a lot of it born from a proud attachment to their town’s boat, seemed to sum up the nucleus of the problem that the Institution had and still does have to negotiate: the switch from the seemingly instinctive know-how of the fisherman to the modern world’s need for clear and measured health and safety rules and vocational training assessments.  The result should be a complementary process and an entertaining one.

But our more prosaic problem, unless we invent a town called Sherington – always an ugly solution, I believe – is that as soon as you put a man on stage and say either he was the lifeboat coxswain then, or is the Senior Helmsman now, local people will say, but we knew or know him! And if you start to introduce features that are local idiosyncrasies, like the coxswain being a member of the Salvation Army, it looks like you are specifically identifying somebody as your source. But you must release us from this straitjacket and please believe us when we say, there is no relation to persons living or dead in our characters. One of my interviewees, who was both coxswain and Salvationist, was a very jolly man, so I deliberately called my character Hangdog and made him a grumpy so-and-so. In short we have taken the outside elements and given them new insides.

My apologies to the region’s many other lifeboat stations whose experiences we have not had time to document, especially those at Hunstanton, Caister, Yarmouth & Gorleston, Lowestoft and Aldeburgh, whose stories often intertwined with our candidates.

Getting all this stuff straight is often what takes the time, but a more important issue is to thank others for giving up their time to describe their lives, experiences, technical knowledge and commitment to a cause that is unique in this modern world and a wonderful example of man’s humanity to man.

Ivan Cutting - Artistic Director