"Fine When She Left Us"?: Theater and the Titanic's Belfast Legacy

In the spring of 2012, Belfast hosted a massive "Heritage Festival," complete with a rock concert staged by MTV and an enormous light show featuring projections, fireworks, and music. This festival also coincided with the opening of a £100 million exhibition center that is in itself a dazzling architectural feat, a building covered with shards of aluminum that reflect the sun's light, giving it the appearance of rippling water. In addition to these headline festivities, other smaller cultural and historical events including talks, exhibits, and theatrical productions explored the city's past. In all, the celebrations took on a triumphant and joyous feeling, and acted almost as a symbolic rebirth for a city that had greatly suffered from both violence and a postindustrial economic decline. The festivities asked residents of Northern Ireland to look forward with new hope and pride, and invited visitors to see Belfast as a dynamic, modern city.

The joyful tone of the festival existed in tension with its official focus, however: the centenary of the RMS Titanic's brief, but dramatic, existence. The ship had been built in Belfast's shipyards, then one of the economic hubs of the city's industrial triumph. When launched, Titanic was widely regarded as a symbol of the unbounded potential of human innovation. After the "unsinkable" ship famously sank, however, it became an instant symbol of human hubris. The decision to use the Titanic as an emblem for civic pride and rebirth was, therefore, far from an obvious choice. For the most part, the festival—especially the larger headline events—used a narrative that minimized the ship's sinking, but instead emphasized the achievement of its construction. The opening pages of a promotional pamphlet for the festival proclaimed, "Only in Belfast can you trace the Titanic story to its source, discover the passion and pride of those who designed and built her and relive the excitement of the Titanic era when the city was at the height of its powers. Titanic is coming home. Come and share the moment with us."¹

The conspicuous omission of the sinking typifies the tone of the document, which, though it includes a brief section on "the tragedy," otherwise references the event that claimed the lives of more than a thousand passengers only in the context of the rediscovery of the shipwreck. The overall message is clear: the tragedy of the shipwreck did not undermine the ingenuity of those who built it. Throughout the city, posters, banners, and T-shirts defiantly proclaimed, "She was fine when she left us!"—a phrase that exemplifies the dark humor for which Northern Ireland is famous, and, in spite of its jocosity, also attempts to create a clear divide between the ship's construction and its fate.

The plays staged around the Titanic festival, however, offer a far more ambivalent view of the ship's legacy in Belfast. In addition to acknowledging the macabre nature of celebrating—as opposed to commemorating or mourning—the Titanic, the plays reject the festival's claims that the building of the Titanic could be an uncomplicated and universal emblem of the city's past greatness and future potential. Two of these plays, Jimmy McAleavey's Titans, a site-specific piece staged throughout the new Titanic Belfast center, and Rosemary Jenkinson's White Star of the North, staged at Belfast's Lyric Theatre, make this especially clear. Together, these plays both explore the lingering shame that surrounds the Titanic in the city's collective memory, and insistently remind audiences that the history of the shipyards in which the Titanic was built is inextricably linked to the city's history of sectarian conflict.

Although the festivities and the plays ostensibly concentrate on Belfast's history, they are even more revealing of its present. In Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (1998), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett observes that, because a heritage project "produces something new in the present that has recourse to the past," it will always be primarily shaped by the needs of those designing it rather than by the past events themselves.² This is...