As Titanic the Musical berths at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, John Byrne talks to Lucie-Mae Sumner, who plays Irish passenger Kate McGowan in the Tony Award-winning hit show.
It's one of those stories that keeps resonating down the generations. Indeed, the Titanic was once again in the news recently, with the disaster that saw a submersible heading to the ships wreckage exploding, killing all five people on board.
The ship - then the biggest ever made - sank on its maiden voyage in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, an event that was global news, and has since developed something of an industry around it.
The tragedy also inspired several movies, most notably James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as Rose DeWitt Bukater and Jack Dawson, two fictitious members of different social classes who fall in love during the ship's maiden voyage.
The events, of course, also inspired a musical, which debuted the same yeas as Cameron’s Hollywood blockbuster. With music and lyrics by Maury Yeston and a book by Peter Stone, it went on to win five Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
1517 men, women and children lost their lives when the Titanic sank. Based on real people aboard the most legendary ship in the world, Titanic The Musical focuses on the hopes, dreams and aspirations of her passengers who each boarded with stories and personal ambitions of their own.
All innocently unaware of the fate awaiting them, the Third Class immigrants’ dream of a better life in America, the Second Class imagine they too can join the lifestyles of the rich and famous, while the millionaire Barons of the First Class anticipate legacies lasting forever.
Naturally, there’s an Irish dimension to the Titanic story. As well as being built at Belfast’s legendary Harland & Wolff shipyard, the Titanic’s first port of call after it left Southampton was at Queenstown, now Cobh.
One of its many Irish passengers was a Kate McGowan, from Mayo. She’s one of the characters portrayed in Titanic The Musical, and is played by Lucie-Mae Sumner, a London-based musical theatre actress with immense talent in Ballad, Choral and Contemporary singing.
Lucie-Mae previously played the part of Kate in the 2019 version of the show, and this new production celebrates the 10th anniversary of its London premiere where it won sweeping critical acclaim across the board. She seemed the obvious choice to chat with about the show . . .
John Byrne: Hi Lucie-Mae! You’ve been on the road with Titanic for some time now. I presume you’re looking forward to coming to Dublin for the show’s final dates?
Lucie-Mae Sumner: Yeah, we’ve been on the road for some time now. We opened in Bromley, oh it must have been six months ago. The second venue we did was Blackpool, which is my home town. But the rest of the time it’s been just exploring the UK.
We’ve had great fun and we’re so pleased to be finishing in Dublin. Liverpool was our last UK date, and getting to Ireland for a week is just fantastic. And I love the Bord Gáis Theatre as well.
And I believe you made a few 'Titanic’ stops along the way. How was that?
We’ve done all the main ports part from that one actually. We did Southampton, Belfast, where the ship was made, and it’s been fantastic to see how the people have responded differently.
A lot of people have family who are descended from people who were on it. It’s really interesting to see how they respond to the show.
I hope - and I’m pretty sure that we do - do justice to those people, because all the characters in the show are based on real people. It’s not the Jack and Rose story, it’a the actual Titanic survivors and victims’ stories. They're both sad and inspiring.
And there are so many interesting stories I’ve learned about since I started. You get people coming to the stage door and things like, ‘Oh, my great-aunt was a baby and survived and then had a new life in America, and had the life that all these passengers dreamed of'.
It’s bit different to doing Mary Poppins, that's for sure! I believe your accent as Kate McGowan is quite impressive and that you put a lot of work into it. We’re a bit sensitive about such things here.
I empathise, because us Northerners don’t get a great representation sometimes. You just think, oh could they not just have gotten someone with the accent. But I think my hair and my heritage does a lot of heavy lifting. There’s definitely some Celtic blood in there!
Tell us a bit about your character Kate McGowan? I believe she was a real person, from Mayo?
She was from near Galway actually. She actually was so charismatic that she took 13 other people with her, all from the same town, Addergoole, and almost all of them perished. Which is so sad.
She also travelled with Anne McGowan, her niece, who did survive, luckily. I won’t tell you what happened to Kate. No spoilers! Annie went on to have a life in America, and went on to to do the things that she dreamed of.
But it’s so sad that all these people from one village, hoping to go on to better things, and when their families said goodbye they didn’t realise that it would literally be goodbye. It was so sad.
Kate is really fascinating to me. There was a recent documentary about her on Netflix. She must have been very charismatic and interesting for people to go, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll all follow her to this strange land’. It’s fantastic.
And the Titanic story in general is one that fascinates so many people, right up to the current day.
I think it must have captured people’s imaginations, the way it was built up so high. It was the biggest ship in the world at the time and it was advertised everywhere. And wherever we’ve been on tour I’ve tried to find out as much as I can and see as much as I can about the Titanic.
It’s amazing when you see all the merchandise that they had! Even people who were not going on the hip were buying it. People buying plates and White Star Line this and White Star Line that.
That company, who made the Titanic, had all this merchandise and it was simply to advertise the ship, really. And people totally bought into it. It’s a bit like the Barbie movie at the minute. People were very excited about it.
Titanic the Musical plays at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre until August 5. Tickets are available from ticketmaster.ie
