Herman Melville’s hallucinogenic magnum opus Moby-Dick is very obviously impossible to compact into 85 minutes of theatre. Quite aside from the question of getting all the story into that amount of time (you can’t) then it’s also kind of the point of Moby-Dick that form follows narrative and that it’s a sanity-testing endurance test for the reader as much as for its narrator Ishmael. Eighty-five minutes into the book, and cursed whaling vessel the Pequod hasn’t even set sail yet.
Those caveats all accepted, this puppet-based show from French-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire is a remarkable spectacle, that channels some of the novel’s cracked cosmic wonder, horrified awe at nature and fascination with the depths of human obsession.
Directed by Yngvild Aspeli, it breaks the gargantuan story down to a few vivid vignettes. Bona fide Bostonian actor Julian Spooner stars as Ishmael, the story’s narrator, and the only fully human performer in the show. Everyone else, from crazed Captain Ahab to doomed cabin-boy Pip is portrayed by eerie (mostly) human sized puppets. With their vacant eyes and grim, craggy faces they look like the crew of a voyage of the damned – which is of course about right. At points the fanatical Ahab – obsessed with killing the eponymous white whale – is whispered to by skull-faced figures who seem to represent his own death-obsessed insanity. White-clad musicians alternate atmospheric washes of keys and lulling wordless vocals with howls of discordant electric feedback. It is a stupendous and evocative spectacle, and often quite beautiful, as the expanse of the Barbican’s stage and David Lejard-Ruffet’s magnificent video projections go some way to conjure the sense of the enormity of ocean and sky.
I do think even 10 more minutes of running time might have increased its lucidity – it is particularly difficult to closely follow what’s going on at the climax.
But like I say, it really isn’t trying to be the book, but rather to evoke something of the book, and in that it succeeds ravishingly.
It’s also just awesome that it’s here at all: there was the worry that the bold programming of the now-defunct London International Mime Festival would be lost to us for good when it shut up shop a few years ago. But the Barbican-based successor festival MimeLondon has basically preserved the best bits of its predecessor’s programme – ie the large-scale international work – and really it’s just great that we live in a city where you can spend January watching a show as audacious and stunning as Moby Dick alongside a sold-out audience. Will you have a whale of a time? Yes. Yes you will.