The Sound & Fury Theater Company wanted to stage a piece based on the tragedy, but quickly shied away from setting it on the stricken vessel itself. So, they invented a British sub and put it in the area at the time of the disaster.

”It is such an extreme situation, and that is the respect that one should feel for the people who lost their lives was a key interest for us,” said Mark Espiner, co-director of Kursk production. “We had the empathetic feeling of what it must have been like on that submarine and we felt an urge to tell that story in the best way that we could, as British people.”

Something else emerged, he added – the extraordinary lives of submariners, who cut themselves off from the world for months on end, playing a sometimes fatal game of cat and mouse hundreds of meters beneath the sea.

Ian Ashpitel plays one of the crew, and is an ex-submariner himself. He advised the production team on the realities of life in the deep.

“They’ve got the camaraderie, the humour, the claustrophobia, the secrecy, the mission stuff,” he said. “The designer was on a submarine with a tape measure, measuring the gap between the seats, console and everything. His attention to detail is fantastic.”

The production also borrows from the seminal depiction of submarine life, the German film “Das Boot”. Both works choose to show the audience only the claustrophobic interior of the sub that the crew would see, and both use sound as a dramatic tool. Sometimes that use is sparing – the theatre goes to black, and we hear the voices of the crew of the Kursk for the first and last time.

“Dima, do you think we’ve got a chance?” says a crew member. “A small chance, yes.”

More than anything, this is a play about a brotherhood under the sea that transcends politics or conflict. The crew of the Kursk was part of that brotherhood, and central to this production is that their loss clearly echoes across international borders.