60 | SATURDAY | 30.04.22 | The Guardian
CULTURE
P
laywright Chloë Moss
grew up watching
container ships passing
by the windows of her
house near the Seaforth
docks in Liverpool.
Decades later, when she returned to
live up the road from her childhood
home, she found herself once again
mesmerised by these vast, faceless
vessels. When she was a child, her
mother told her bedtime fairy stories
about the men who went to sea, but
any lingering sense of romance about
lives of the sailors working on board
was comprehensively stamped out
during the four years of research she
undertook before writing her new
play, Corrina, Corrina.
The confi ned, claustrophobic
environment of a cargo ship off ers
such a perfect setting for a thriller, it
seems remarkable that playwrights
have not previously chosen to locate
their scripts within these rigidly
hierarchical surroundings. Audiences
will quickly discover that life on board
is streaked with misogyny, racism,
exploitation and violence, but these
are problems that have very rarely
attracted much attention because
shipping industry news rarely makes
the front page. “It’s such an invisible
industry,” Moss says, speaking over
Zoom during a break on day three of
rehearsals in Liverpool. “It’s kind of
blindly ignored, which is very strange
considering that something like 90%
of everything you own has come in via
a ship. There is no capitalism without
the shipping industry – it’s huge.”
Her play centres on a young woman,
Corrina , who arrives at Felixstowe
docks to take up a job as a junior offi cer
on a ship about to embark for
Singapore. The only woman on board,
she is caught between the British
senior staff and rest of the crew,
mainly made up of badly paid men
from the Philippines, who spend
protracted periods away from their
families.
“The ship in the play is a microcosm
of society,” says Moss. “You’ve got the
old white guy in charge, the captain,
and then the badly exploited workers
at the bottom of the pile.” Corrina
is trying to navigate her way through
the complex power dynamics,
determined to hold her own. She
begins quietly self-assured and grows
angrier and more powerful as the play
progresses, and as the insuperable
nature of the male-dominated
structures around her sinks in.
Moss’s research was painstaking.Distress
signal
Word s: Amelia G entleman
STAGESTAGE
In her gripping new play
set on a cargo ship,
Chloë Moss reveals
the dangers faced by
women working in
the shipping industry
She worked with the charity
Kanlungan , which supports Filipino
migrant workers, to understand the
diffi culties they face. She toured
a container ship; contacted the
maritime trade union Nautilus
International ; attended female
seafarers’ conferences; and
interviewed lots of female cadets.
She was particularly startled by the
amount of abuse women endure
during their work. “Women make up
around 1% of the shipping industry,”
she says, “so, most likely, if you’re a
woman on a cargo ship, you’re going to
be the only woman on board. I didn’t
speak to one female seafarer who
hadn’t had directly been aff ected by
sexual harassment or sexual violence.
There wasn’t one. You can’t really get
a clearer manifestation of patriarchy
than on board a cargo ship.”
While she was researching, Moss
was very struck by the story of Akhona
Geveza, a 19-year-old South African
cadet who disappeared while she was
working on a cargo ship in 2010.
Geveza said she had been raped by
a senior crew member, and when this
was reported to the captain, he set up
a three-way meeting between Gevezaand her attacker, as if it was
a personnel matter that could be
resolved through mediation; she
did not turn up for the meeting, and
her body was found off the Croatian
coast three days later.
“ It was just ruled a suicide. It was
unbelievable, and one of the root
problems is that the captain is God on
a ship. So however he decides to deal
with it is how it gets dealt with. It’s the
law of the captain,” Moss says.
Because ships are usually in
international waters, the legal
jurisdiction can be uncertain. “You’ve
got fl ags of convenience, where
shipowners register a ship to one
country, usually one that lacks laws
around working conditions and wage
protection. And you’ve got a
multinational crew who are heading
from one side of the world to the other,
through international waters where
there is no jurisdiction. The big
question is : who takes responsibility
for any crime that happens? And the
answer is usually nobody.”
Corrina’s story is not Geveza’s story,
but there are common threads. Moss’s
heroine , like the South African cadet,
is encouraged to go to sea as part of