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Port of Gibraltar, Christmas 1872: outside a waterfront café a cross-section of Victorian society awaits the outcome of the official Mary Celeste salvage hearing.

There are Tourists (the Chorus) on a winter cruise; travellers on business including a Missionary, a Journalist, a Botanist, an Artist, an Archæologist; there are the Owners of Mary Celeste and the Bereaved Families of the lost Crew; and there are the people of the colony including Dockers, Children, Barkers, a Medium, Waitresses, and the Band.

As the investigating Attorney goes into court he tells the Crowd there will be a solution to the riddle by the end of the day, if they care to remain.

Eager speculation follows: while waiting, various factions in the Crowd put forward differing answers to the riddle of the empty ship: each solution mimics the interests of its proposers. Each theory (there are nine in all) is played out in dramatic 'flashback' by the Crew's ghosts on the deck of Mary Celeste, in an appropriate style, comic, romantic, mysterious, exciting or serious. From time to time the Court Herald balances their speculations with matters of historical fact.

At last the Attorney reappears to sum up: he declares that the Mary Celeste enigma can be solved only by re-enacting the voyage, to determine which of the nine theories is actually the fatal one.

Reluctant (planted) 'volunteers' are seized from the Audience, and told that everything in the show has been performed by phantoms, who have returned to the present day with an urgent warning: our planetary ship risks going the way of Mary Celeste, its vulnerable crew threatened by each of the hazards the Victorians faced, but simultaneously, and on a huge scale.

The show ends on an upbeat and affirmative note: the company promise to reclaim control of our precious ship by renouncing or trying to stamp out disease, addiction, famine, climatic disorder, money-lust, genetic freak, mumbo-jumbo, anarchy, and industrial catastrophe so that we may sail, intact, into the new millennium.

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