Theatre - Lifeboat

Director Gill Robertson found the inspiration for her award-winning production, Lifeboat, in the back of a Sunday paper. ‘It was a How We Met story”, she tells me, “about two women in their seventies who’d been friends since they were fifteen.” Rather than a sentimental testimony to the longevity of their friendship, Robertson found an extraordinary account of the circumstances which had led to it. “They were evacuees on their way to Canada, during WW2, when their ship was torpedoed. Most of the passengers died, but the two girls (Beth Cumming and Bess Walder) managed to survive by clinging to an upturned lifeboat for nineteen hours in the middle of the Atlantic. They’d been friends ever since.” Robertson was immediately struck by the dramatic power of the narrative. “I knew it would be a great play but I had no idea how to stage it”, she says. It was after sharing the story with writer Nicola McCartney that the pair started to work together to turn it into a play. A couple of years later the finished product was awarded the Barclays Stage Award for Best Show for children and young people.

Part of the research process was in talking and meeting with Bess and Beth, now in their eighties, and thus being able to fill in the details. “They are both great characters”, says Robertson, “Bess had been a head-teacher and was very stiff upper lip about it all. But both thought there was nothing special about their experience. They were just grateful to have survived”. They also learned the back-story to the evacuation itself, “Beth didn’t want to leave her mother”, Robertson tells me, “whereas Bess was quite excited about the prospect of a new life.”