A ghost story from the wreck of the MS Estonia.
“It's not going to work, Maggie. Give it up.”
Daniel stares into his radar screen, trying to concentrate on the ships that pass his coastal monitoring station.
He's alone… he's always alone. And yet, the woman he met that night, the night she died, won't shut up. “Guilty?” she scoffs, her voice grating on his conscience. “What in the world do you have to feel guilty about?”
The Estonia is a gripping and emotional new play that explores survival, memory, trauma and human resilience in the face of disaster.
Written by celebrated novelist Billy O'Shea and produced by Unqualified Arts, it is a darkly comic psychological drama that introduces two fictional characters, connected through the real-world maritime disaster of 1994, when a passenger ferry sank off the coast of Finland — taking 852 lives with her. Of the 137 survivors, most were young men.
Daniel, representing one of those young men, is now haunted by the ghost of Maggie, who won't let him ignore what happened. On the anniversary of the sinking, she visits him during his night shift at the radar station and whisks him back in time to face the truth.
The play uses clever dialogue, flashbacks and immersive soundscapes to explore issues of survival, grief and PTSD.
To read the full script, please contact the production team directly.
An intimate play set in the shadow of the MS Estonia. It remains the deadliest peacetime shipwreck in European waters, and yet outside the Nordics and Baltics it's largely been forgotten.
When news of the event struck in the early hours of 28th September 1994, communities were shaken by the scale of the tragedy and horrified that such a disaster could strike in modern times. One of the themes of this play highlights human complacency — the assumption that we are somehow invulnerable to the power of nature.
This production aims to tell the story in new regions, and to help audiences in the most affected communities to process their collective trauma around the event, through dramatic exploration of the mental health effects suffered by our fictional characters. It doesn't shy away from the very raw and self-punishing emotions that can accompany survival or witnessing disasters, but instead examines how to manage them and learn to continue living.
In a particularly poignant moment, the audience is plunged into over six minutes of darkness — immersed in a carefully reproduced soundscape, experiencing the sensation of being aboard a vessel in distress, and then entering the cold nighttime water.
“I loved the sarcastic humour! But I wasn't prepared for the emotion of it all.”
“This needs to be staged — I love it, I want to see it again and again.”