Pluck – The Titanic Show, The Old Market, Hove, May 14-15 (From The Argus)

Pluck – The Titanic Show, The Old Market, Hove, May 14-15

9:51am Friday 14th May 2010 in Fringe previews By Nione Meakin

We needed a pretty big venue,” Jon Regan explains, “you know, for the iceberg.”

For their third show, musical comedy trio Pluck re-imagine the story of the musicians who famously played on while the Titanic met its fate. “There seemed to be a fair bit of potential in the scenario,” says Jon, who plays viola with Sian Kadifachi on cello and vocals and Aidan Garratt on violin. “Our first two outings were basically concerts, with the humour arising from the interaction between the people on stage. This has more of a theatrical bent.”

The three musicians were all classically trained – Kadifachi has performed at the Royal Albert Hall and Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, Regan holds a Masters in Music from Trinity College London.

How did they alight on the idea of sending themselves up as a “hilariously incompetent” string trio? “It came quite naturally,” laughs Regan. “It’s just doing what we normally do but affectionately mocking it. It’s the sort of thing I’d have liked to have seen when I was starting out and we do get a lot of musicians coming to our shows, as well as families with kids who are learning to play instruments.”

After all, the music itself is “fairly straight. We play a mixture of classical and more popular stuff from that era – Scott Joplin numbers and so on. The first piece we play is the actual piece that was played when people boarded the ship. We wanted to keep the music quite accurate, at least. But it’s unlikely audiences will have seen people playing this sort of music while running around trying to put a deck chair up with their feet.”

*7pm May 14; 2.30pm and 7pm May 15, £10/£8, call 01273 709709