A job that changed me: At the Titanic theatre restaurant we always hit an iceberg, but were often hit by bread rolls too | Restaurants

It was 1998, the year after James Cameron’s Titanic had made a splash with cinematic audiences worldwide, and I – an amateur musical theatre performer and creative arts uni student – took an acting job in one of humankind’s most venerated performance venues: the theatre restaurant.

If you loved restaurants, theatre and the idea of combining those two things, there was nowhere in the world that had more to offer in the late 1990s than Melbourne. Dracula’s, Witches in Britches, The Looney Bin and others proudly continued the legacy created by Dirty Dicks and The Last Laugh in the 1970s, dishing out average meals and watered-down cocktails to a soundtrack of bawdy jokes and themed song parodies.

The Titanic Theatre Restaurant took on a more serious subject matter. The owner had taken an old pub on a quiet corner of the harbour suburb of Williamstown and turned it into a distorted scale model of the doomed ship, adding portholes, a gangway and even a set of smoke-billowing chimneys to the facade of the historic hotel – all of which attracted some local controversy.

Inside, the upper level was transformed into the “first-class” dining room – complete with chandeliers and a string trio – and the ground floor into steerage.

The restaurant had been operating for a few years before the film came out, but an updated script added a love story to appeal to fans of the movie, and I was brought on to play Jonathon, a first-class passenger who would, of course, fall in love with a steerage passenger.

I’d become smitten with my third-class Irish rose up to five nights a week in defiance of my overbearing sister, running up and down stairs to perform to both classes while we all pretended we didn’t know what was going to happen.

While the inevitable arrival of the (polystyrene) iceberg was always dramatic – making fake walls buckle, setting off small fireworks and flooding a chamber below the feet of the steerage passengers with actual water – it was the walk we’d do around the venue with the musicians, stopping at each table to sing old standards, that was often the most fun, and toughest, part of the job.

The Titanic had a more tragic, biographical theme than the other theatre restaurants in town – not a single horny song parody or lewd joke to be found. But there was plenty of crossover in the clientele. Hens’ nights, end-of-year work parties and boozy birthday gatherings were regular bookings, often seated next to romantic anniversary dinners and even the odd wedding proposal.

Some visitors dressed up, quoted the film (“I’m the king of the wooooooorld!”) and role-played their class for the night. But some took it further. Being propositioned by guests came with the job as did, sadly, being groped while we tried to get through a rendition of La Vie en Rose. Diners who smuggled alcohol turned from “in character” to “unfiltered asshole”, and first class occasionally took their assigned superiority a little too seriously: bread rolls, and on one memorable night, actual forks, rained down from the balcony on to the steerage passengers below. If the food wasn’t up to scratch, we heard about that too, usually mid-song, usually via yet another hurled bit of bread.

All the guests survived, of course, regardless of whether they’d been dining in first class or steerage. Those upstairs were treated to a fibreglass recreation of the Statue of Liberty that would rise on a scissor-lift, complete with fireworks, while downstairs the waters below passengers’ feet would subside while everyone sang along anachronistically to New York, New York.

I left after six years, not because the ship was sinking but because there are only so many times you can go down with it. Running around in a waistcoat taught me more about performing under pressure than any drama school could have, as well as how quickly a costume and a fake class system seemed to give people permission to behave badly. Still, I wouldn’t trade it for anything; pretending not to know an iceberg was coming night after night turned out to be decent training for adult life.