A Titanic undertaking

You can really imagine the problem....The 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster is approaching, you have a budget of £11m to spend on a drama series to mark it and you’ve even managed to assemble a dream team of TV talents to make it all happen. But then, looming in the background like a giant iceberg is James Cameron’s 1997 all-conquering blockbuster. Lingering memories of Kate, Leo and wailing siren Celine Dion waiting to sink your own project. It’s like making a show about a rogue shark and expecting people not to be remembering the attack music from Jaws.

The solution? Take evasive action, change course and do something completely different. Instead of a single epic love story, create a multi-layered ensemble piece with numerous characters and interwoven plot-lines that show the experience of the tragedy from several different perspectives. With Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes penning the story, it isn’t surprising that this four-part ITV series also presents a fascinating snapshot of British society in 1912, and throws in quite a few Irish angles.

With the benefit of hindsight, the Titanic really is the ideal vehicle to symbolise the end of an era in British history. World War I is just around the corner, the empire will soon begin to crumble, ancient class structures are about to be challenged and the suffragettes are on the march. But for now, the old order seems unsinkable, and the hubristic arrogance that produced such an attitude is apparent in several of the characters in this series, particularly those at the upper end of the social scale.

TV3 has invested over €300,000 in the series and, along with the presence of actors Ruth Bradley and Peter McDonald, and mentions of Belfast and Queenstown, the vehicle for many of the Irish angles in the series is the character of Muriel Batley, played by Maria Doyle Kennedy. A fictional creation, the bright and embittered Irish woman is the childless wife of lawyer John Batley (Toby Jones) and has a touch of the Roy Keanes about her. Frustrated by restrictions of gender, class and nationality, she shocks the prawn-sandwich brigade on the upper decks with her forthright views. “Patronising bitch!” she yells at her upper-crust Anglo-Irish nemesis.

Unsurprisingly, it was a character Doyle Kennedy easily warmed to.

“The idea that was very big for me doing this role was that if you were a bright woman in those times, you would have no outlet for it,” explains the 47-year-old actress/singer who first came to prominence in The Commitments. “Muriel was a very bright woman and she would have been very capable of having a career as a lawyer as her husband was, but at the time she wasn’t allowed to work in the professions. And being in that middle class, she also couldn’t have taken on a job that was considered menial. She had no children, so here you had this very smart woman rotting away from loneliness and frustration.”

It’s this intersection of individual characters with the context of their times that Fellowes is so good at writing, and is one of the main reasons why Titanic will most likely be hailed as a success alongside the Tory peer’s previous creations such as Gosford Park and Downton.

Though the Irish actress had appeared in series two of Fellowes’s hugely popular series, the Downton connection was almost more of a hindrance than a help in getting the part on Titanic. After a scheduling change meant that Emily Watson, the actress originally cast for the character, became unavailable, director Jon Jones was impressed enough with Doyle Kennedy’s reading for the part to battle for her against other decision-makers who were wary of any further connections with Downton beyond Fellowes. So, serendipitously, she ended up on that flight to Budapest last summer for two months of filming.

Doyle Kennedy is not the type of person to complain about the life of a successful actress, but it does sound like the cast faced a fairly gruelling routine in Hungary.

Fifteen-hour days were the norm, with the most demanding of them spent filming at Europe’s biggest indoor water tank, built specially for the series and left intact as a legacy to the land-locked country’s screen industry. The hectic production schedules of it all ensured there was no swanning around the dressing room in a fluffy bathrobe.

“We spent hours and hours soaking wet in these very complicated Victorian outfits. And the idea of having to put those wet clothes back on would be so revolting that you are better off to just stay in them. The upside of that is because you get cold and tired, your natural inclination is to buoy each other up, so me and Toby spent a lot of time cracking jokes and having a laugh.” They also had the surreal sight of director Jones in a wetsuit next to them in the five-foot deep tank, complete with his laminated production notes.

She did get home to Dublin on a few occasions, and her husband, Cork musician Kieran Kennedy, and their four sons, also managed a visit when the school holidays kicked in. Now finished on Downton — part of a run of excellent roles that has also included The Tudors, Dexter and forthcoming film Albert Nobbs — Doyle Kennedy has switched her attentions back to music for a while. An album due out later this year features duets with the likes of Damien Rice, Paul Brady and John Prine.

Singer, actress, mother — and the holder of an honours degree in politics and business from Trinity College — you’d imagine it’s a life her Titanic character would have dreamt of.

* Titanic begins on ITV and TV3 next Sunday, Mar 25.

* Maria Doyle Kennedy’s album, Sing, is released in September. mariadk.com