Review: Coffin Ship – an immersive new gothic horror about wronged women and the perils of revenge

Erin Harrington reviews Coffin Ship, by Bryn Sparks, directed by Dan Bain, at Little Andromeda, Thursday 30 October, 2025.

Making serious horror theatre is really hard. I’d wager it’s the hardest genre to pull off, even more so that other speculative forms like science fiction and fantasy. Overtly demonstrative forms like the grotesque and the campy comic-gothic are easy enough, but grounding horror in the real – playing it straight – requries a counterintuitive approach and a steady hand. It needs restraint and not excess, to obscure and not show, to narrow the viewer’s field of vision and let their imagination fill in the blanks. It needs dramatic irony, so that the audience is far enough ahead of the characters to know that there’s a problem, but not so far that they are underwhelmed by revelations. It needs flashes of violence, or viscera, not an all out assault. It needs actors confident enough to play things down the worse things get. It needs to slowly ratchet up the terror (the dread, the anticipation), bending the rules of the everyday, so that when you hit the horror – the revulsion or shock when you see the ‘monster’, the thing – you still believe in the world, the characters, and the stakes. You muck one bit up and everything unravels.

Developing new scripted work is also really hard. Outside of dedicated writing programmes, there are few support mechanisms – far fewer than for devised pieces. In New Zealand, proper dramaturgical assistance, mentorship, and opportunities to workshop scripts are hard to come by; funders don’t seem to see it as a priority, even though you don’t get new plays and skilled playwrights unless you nurture the green shoots. Plays grounded in a particular time and place take a lot of additional research, too, to ensure details are correct and dialect rings true.  

All of this is to say that the fact that the ambitious new gothic horror work Coffin Ship exists at all is a minor miracle. That it is pretty bloody good is even more impressive.

This atmospheric hour-long play, written by Bryn Sparks and directed by Dan Bain, is set at the height of the Great Irish Famine. It’s a time when people were trying to hold off starvation by eating grass and rocks, and when convicts and emigrants alike would be jammed into crowded, disease-ridden ships so dangerous that death rates were astronomical.

There are other forms of hunger, though. The play centres on a young woman, Molly Driscoll (Caitlin Penhey) – or is it O’Toole? – who has stowed away on a convict ship to seek revenge on her unfaithful husband Colm (Sebastian Boyle). He has been sentenced to hard labour in the colonies for a terrible crime; Molly, consumed by anger, thinks he should have hanged, and so plans to balance the scales of justice herself. In a dark, secretive corner of the ship she meets another starving woman, Dora (Lucy Sparks) – or is it Aoife? She has a hunger, and (funnily enough) a Colm, of her own. The audience immediately knows something is off about Dora, but does Molly? In the bleak, creaking darkness of the hold, the two wronged women connect immediately. Over time their stories, and their desires, seem to blur into one, and as we learn more about the two women, and their relationships, Molly is offered a terrible choice. Maybe someone should have told her that when you seek revenge, you should dig two graves.

The three actors commit deeply to their roles, and the world of the play. Accent work is strong. I love how Penhey balances fury, righteousness, doubt and vulnerability. Physically, she embraces stillness and interiority, shifting between distress and watchfulness, modulating her emotions well to meet the arc of the script. Sparks is equal parts playful and malevolent, imbuing Dora with a tense and angular sense of physicality. It’s a charismatic, at times antagonistic performance. She ably sells the play’s shifts in register, especially when the script finally plays its hand. In a lesser production both roles would be overwrought, shaky, and shouty, but here they are intelligently played.

Boyle has the trickiest role, I think, switching between three characters – two Colms and a priest. They each provoke action but have less emotional depth than the women (perhaps deliberately). Boyle’s a strong foil to the two other actors, though, giving each of his roles a clear sense of presence and emotional legibility, even when the characters themselves are oblivious to the emotional damage they are causing in a world where women, and their wants, are easily discarded.

Bain’s lucid direction and evocative production design wrings an awful lot out of Little Andromeda’s technical capabilities. It’s the first time I’ve seen the seating block rearranged in an interesting way – here, removing seats through the middle of the audience to create a walkway, or gangplank, and some additional and effective new playing spaces. This spatial manipulation positions us as both witnesses and fellow travellers. I know it restricts ticketing, and has a few health and safety implications, but it’s a great conceit and I hope more people experiment with the space like this in the future.

The simple set is made up of a steamer trunk and some other stacked cases, and a light triangular sail helps guide the eye while allowing for shifts in colour. Period costuming is simple and effective, as are the props. Lighting and sound help shape a cohesive, twisted emotional and physical world. The design makes much of the interplay between light and dark, as well as spaciousness and restricted perspectives, at times drawing the eye into well-considered images, or restricting our vision in appealing ways.

For the most part everything is very immersive, although there are moments when some of the characters are wracked by strange supernatural manifestations and shuffled about in a way that I don’t think reads clearly just yet. I freely admit that this might be a me problem, as the theatre’s soundproofing issues, and the very audible and distracting Taylor Swift from a nearby bar, may have pulled me out of the moment from time to time.

Coffin Ship really swings for the fences, and succeeds in presenting a compelling gothic work about uncanny doubles, dark desires and terrible choices. Everyone involved takes the characters, their story, and the genre seriously. Collectively they bring the audience with them on a moody, unsettling journey with a strong emotional core and a great pay off. Whether you like new work, character drama, or just a good dose of spooky business, I’d recommend getting on board.

Coffin Ship plays at Little Andromeda until Saturday 1 November.