For all but the most tenacious of readers, Herman Melville’s epic Moby Dick is a bit of a conundrum: consistently being named amongst the very best novels in the English language, it also regularly appears on lists of the form’s most challenging books.
The stage adaptation of a difficult-to-read-book, therefore, has considerable attractions: it may inspire you to pick up the novel, but if not it saves you hours of effort and time, 21 hours 11 minutes in the case of the Moby Dick audio book—a fact readily acknowledged by Sebastian Armesto, who wrote the version now playing at Wilton’s Music Hall as part of a tour.
The novel of Moby Dick is as long as it is because it is much more than just an adventure on the high seas; it is densely packed with detail about life on board a whaler, its hardships, camaraderie and the violence of the chase and kill, much of it autobiographical.
There is also a sub-structure of often intricate and obscure material—symbols of life and death, religious allegory and musings on egotistical pursuits—that supports and infiltrates the narrative of Captain Ahab seeking, in angry revenge, the white whale that took his leg on a previous voyage.
Armesto’s adaptation of Melville’s masterpiece is a wonderfully well-considered and balanced distillation of all this.
This revival also has a continuing topicality with Moby Dick presented as a creature of majesty and of natural instinct, to be seen in contrast to man’s self-appointed superiority, premeditation and commercial greed, as apparent then as today with seven of the species vulnerable to extinction.
Similar to its source material, this adaptation is in no hurry to reach its narrative and moral conclusions. There is an argument for saying that the frequent use of song in the play draws out the already lengthy and does little to contribute to advancement of the plot, but it is one of many instruments adopted by Melville to deliver his complexly deep opus.
Authenticity aside, the songs (all unarguably very well-sung and played) are essential as offset, lest the stage adaptation be as turgid as the book. In any event, it is the ensemble scenes more generally that carry this play, although director Jesse Jones knows when to let Guy Rhys’s wonderfully maniacal Ahab have his head.
Hannah Emanuel is quietly strong as First Mate, Starbuck, his altruism, prudence and composure pointing up the irrationality of the Captain’s uncompromising fanaticism.
Lighting design by Johanna Town notably contributes to the visual artistry of the piece, creating both drama and atmospheric seascapes, helping make this a journey where the pleasure of the voyage is as important as its destination.