It's 31st September 1938. The SS Vulcanic prepares to depart Southampton for New York. At embarcation, eight of the crew and passengers are carrying curiously similar hat boxes, inside each of which lies the key to a terrible secret, and when they are mixed up, a fiendishly complex series of events is set in motion.
First Officer KURT - a clandestine Nazi - stages a fake emergency, evacuates most of the passengers and crew, seizes control of the ship - with its secret cargo of gold - and rendezvous with a U boat in the Bermuda triangle.
Those remaining on board include: HELGA - a stowaway fleeing with the secret formula of Hitler's breakfast cereal; SAM O BALUSTRADE - the Hollywood producer whose wife went to pieces, and now the pieces are in his luggage; DAME CLARRIE TINKER-TAYLOR - a novelist who used to be Harry Tinker-Taylor before he lost his insignia in the Dardanelles; evangelist HENRIETTA TEMPLE DAY - a Sister who is about to become a mother; and LORD BRIGHTON - who has unwittingly just married his sister, owing to the fact that he and Captain STEWART COOK were mixed up as babies.
Clear so far? Then that just leaves cannibalism, murder, kidnapping, the bomb, the iceberg - oh, and the volcano!
With a cliche count higher than a Sun editorial, this devistatingly wicked satire is guaranteed to slay more sacred cows than a BSE epidemic. It invents the genre of the alternative comedy musical, as four actors play an entire ship of fools.