Review: MOBY DICK, Barbican Theatre

With life-size puppets and cinematic stylings, Plexus Polaire’s Moby Dick is a dark and immersive plunge into Herman Melville’s epic story.

In many ways, the centrepiece of this year’s Mime Festival is the very epitome of the source material which is as much about a life on the ocean wave and a journey into the unknown than Ahab’s famed search for his giant nemesis. On the one hand, Melville waxed lyrical about the spiritual and plunged us into a weary seascape of hardened harpooners; on the other, he filled paragraphs with ponderous prose that bulked out the text’s length to over 200,000 words.  

Director Yngvild Aspeli’s atmospheric staging goes beyond the crepuscular to be almost permanently set to midnight black, a mood setting that permeates the souls of both those aboard the Pequod and the audience as we settle into something which is as much an experience as anything else. The French-Norwegian company builds out this maritime world through music, video projection and live acting alongside a range of puppets both big and small. The set design from Elisabeth Holager Lund is deliberately and aptly a fluid affair: sometimes it features a two-tier arrangement in the centre allowing the three-piece band and cast to make fulsome use of the huge stage’s width and height; other times, everything fades into the background and all we are presented with is just a hypnotic inky view of the sea. 

As important when it comes to setting the deep, deep mood of Moby Dick is the musical contributions of the musicians Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen, Guro Skumsnes Moe and Havard Skaset. Aspeli takes us to some chaotic and gruesome places - from men on small boats attacking a whale to seeing its carcass slowly flayed and taken apart until only the head remains - and, whether amping up the tension through crunchy rock sounds as the men put themselves into danger or laying down smoother, softer and more subtle beats as they get to work on their bloody reward, the episodes never lack for an engaging soundtrack. 

Only one character is represented throughout by an actor. Call him a narrator, a psychopomp or even some earthly representation of Charon steering out a path into the inhuman and inhumane hell these seamen find themselves in; you can even call him Ishmael, should you wish. A slow first third establishes Ishmael’s role and motivations and we see clearly a man who feels adrift on land, his life spinning away from him with every day. He looks to the sea as an emblem of the emblem of nobility and melancholy he feels in his soul. 

Through his point of view, we are introduced to the thirty-strong crew foremost of which is the top-knotted Polynesian Queequeg. He becomes Ishmael’s closest friend and it’s a thrilling sight seeing him jumping out from the ship to attack the sharks who have come to feed on the whale corpse. There are less brutal scenes too showing the camaraderie on board, for example when Queequeg and Ishmael buddy up to process the spermaceti (a valuable substance derived from a whale’s head).

This is undoubtedly a statement piece from Plexus Polaire and Mime Festival. The intensity and scale alone are bewildering and set pieces like those of Pip falling overboard are highly effective in making us all feel as small as the harpooners compared to their prey. It lacks the intimate nature of the smaller shows in Mime London or the narrative is far from tidy in places. Aspeli’s decision to remove most of the “gams” (or ship meetings) described in the original story helps the story flow even if it makes the overall journey less eventful, whale hunts aside. Offering a more meaningful and contemplative interrogation of Melville’s themes, Moby Dick ultimately works best as a meaty meditation on our place in the universe and the black depths of the human soul. 

Moby Dick continues at Barbican Theatre until 1 February.

Photo credit: Christophe Raynaudde Lage

 

To post a comment, you must register and login.