Leviathan

White sails drop from the ceiling and aerialists wind their way up the rigging. A crew of sailors, dressed in geometric PVC onesies that make their legs look like triangles, bounce black plastic balls to a beat. The leather-clad captain strums a rhythm on her electric cello and ghostly, choral sea shanties drift overhead. This, I imagine, is what would happen if Robert Wilson ran P&O.

You might remember Living Structures from their big hit at the Old Vic Tunnels: 2010’s ‘Cart Macabre’, a theatrical fairground ride into the afterlife, was theirs. ‘Leviathan’, their take on ‘Moby Dick’, is more abstract. Much more abstract. It’s like someone translated Herman Melville’s novel into shapes.

Wearing white oilskins, we’re herded and shunted around the warehouse space that represents (abstractly, obviously) Captain Ahab’s ship. Crewmembers haul giant slabs of blubber up above us and heave billowing sheets over our heads. Tai chi-style routines stand in for the repetitive toil of seamanship. They splash us with mopheads and wave white circles around like rhythmic gymnasts.

All of which is enjoyably deranged, but, though there’s some tonal variety – sometimes it’s stormy, sometimes becalmed – it’s mostly just baffling. Any sense of story gets lost in an overstewed adaptation of Melville’s already famously dense text – ‘sequentialist feuds’, anyone? – that makes even less sense when delivered through, and distorted by, megaphones. You’ve no idea who this naked swimmer, front-crawling across a canvas sea, might be, nor what’s going on when the whale – a giant white inflatable – suddenly bursts into proceedings.

‘Leviathan’ never quite swallows you whole. It hasn’t the scale to justify its title and it never becomes a visceral, immersive experience. Set-piece follows set-piece, and each takes some setting up, stalling momentum. It’s ambitious and impressive, for sure, particularly Ula Dajerling’s designs and Verity Standen’s compositions, but this singular creation doesn’t quite work.