DAVE Windass has been a bricklayer, college lecturer, milkman, debt collector, theatre critic and freelance journalist.

Put those together and you have a playwright who understands the working man and has a facility for reportage.

His first two plays, Kicked Into Touch and Sully, tapped into Hull's great religion, Rugby League, bringing pathos, humour and local knowledge to tales of bygone heroes.

Now his reporting instincts furnish a story of more heroes, this time of the unsung variety: the men and now women of the RNLI who staff the lifeboat at Spurn Point.

Hull Truck has presented such sea-borne dramas as John Godber and Nick Lane's adaptation of Moby Dick in 2002 and Richard Bean's Under The Whaleback in 2004, and the first decision for director Gareth Tudor Price, as it was in 2004, was how to present the highs and lows on the high seas.

Not a jot of water dampens Richard Foxton's stage design. Instead, the sound and fury of storms signify everything, particularly in a swell that drowns out Edward Peel's George as he sings "For Those In Peril On The Sea".

Peel's George is the epicentre of Windass's heavily narrative drama, as narrator and constant presence in a story that stretches back to wartime. We join him in the present day, upright as ever on his last day as coxswain, alongside ladies' man Cooky (Richard Standing), the sea-worn Portuguese (David Barrass), student novice Dobbo (Matthew Stathers) and their first female crew member, Jo (Laura Doddington), from Scotland.

Windass's memory play does send the crew out on rescue shouts, but longer stretches focus on the impact of life away from the waves, on camaraderie, family and lives and loves lost. Consequently, beyond the storm and rescue scenes, the visual impact is lacking.

Windass goes more for the heart: George recalling the loss at sea of his father and brother; Barrass's legendary coxswain Ronald Rix reflecting ruefully on how he could save hundreds at sea, but not his own child at home; and Doddington's WREN officer suffering rejection in love.

On A Shout has the Hull Truck trademarks of earthy humour, multiple role playing and emotional swells, but is rather too much report, not enough drama.


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