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A family story about the Titanic proved the perfect catalyst for boosting Tom Foreman's (Psychological and Behavioural Sciences 2018) playwriting career.

When he graduated from the University of Cambridge, Tom was determined to make it as a writer for theatre. He had been taking shows to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe every year since 2017, but the cost of living in London as a graduate meant that making a large financial loss on his plays was no longer an option.

“I had to figure out how to create a powerful piece of theatre that was also commercially viable,” says Tom.

“I had a family story about a Titanic survivor. Growing up, my grandfather always told us that our great-great-grandfather was a man named Frederick Barrett, a stoker who died in the boiler rooms of the Titanic. He was immensely proud of this story.

“My grandfather started to get seriously ill a few years ago and my initial feeling was anger. He was known for being a storyteller and I felt angry that his stories would end with him. As a writer, my expression of love in that moment was to find a way to immortalise his story.”

The result was Boiler Room Six, a one-man play about Barrett’s experience on the Titanic. The show received acclaim from its audiences and was the 2024 winner of Best Overall Show at the Festival in the 2024 Derek Awards, run by an independent community of reviewers at the Edinburgh Fringe.

“We won it on the last day of our show, which was a year to the day after my grandfather had passed away,” adds Tom. “It felt like we had done the right thing by telling this story.”

While carrying out research for the play, Tom discovered that Barrett had in fact survived the Titanic and had a separate family in the years following. Tom has been unable to verify his relationship to Barrett, but the story nonetheless remains deeply personal to him.

Boiler Room Six was later picked up for an international tour and enjoyed a successful second run in Edinburgh last summer. It has recently had a new national tour announced, with the play due to be performed across 19 regional venues. This is the biggest tour to date for Tom Foreman Productions and marks a huge step forward for the company. The profits from the show have allowed Tom to change from full-time to part-time work at Sky, where he is a Media Planning Manager, and pursue his writing more vigorously.

Tom’s other plays include Big Boys, an exploration of adolescent male friendship, and Swell, which follows the relationship between two siblings in a town whose inhabitants are set to be Britain’s first climate refugees.

“My work is trying to tell really small human stories with big implications,” he adds. “Character and human connection are the most important thing for me.”

Tom’s creative streak began in his childhood, brought on by annual visits with his mother to the Fringe, his own rebellion against his family’s encouragement to pursue athletics, and his grandfather’s flair for storytelling. His love for making theatre was fostered further at Gonville & 91ֱ�� College, where the Shadwell Society, the College society for creative arts, provided life-changing opportunities, including funding his play Big Boys Don’t Cry (later Big Boys) at the Corpus Playroom in Cambridge.

“It marked my first attempt at taking writing seriously and I wanted to treat it as a professional production,” says Tom. “We got really good reviews and then sold out a run in London. I still talk about Big Boys when I am applying for bigger show venues, and that all started during my time at 91ֱ��.

“I was also President of the Shadwell Society when Covid hit, and whilst we weren’t able to put anything on, the committee and I bonded in that time. I am now working in a professional capacity with people I met on that committee. The connections I made at 91ֱ�� have proved really important for where I am at the moment.”