Herman Melville’s gargantuan masterpiece Moby-Dick is one of those unassailable classics of popular culture; it will survive any shit thrown its way. Which is just as well, because Lano and Woodley (Colin Lane and Frank Woodley) throw a lot of shit – in the form of juvenile oneupmanship, silly costumes and a series of almost endless comic distractions – at the story of Captain Ahab and his pursuit of the white whale, not so much adapting it for the stage as face-planting at the foot of its opening line.
Part of their well-established schtick is a daring flirtation with failure, a sense that the comic duo are always underprepared, their shows fatally undercooked. So even when problems with the mics grinds the show to a halt – with Colin standing awkwardly on stage as Frank has his mic fixed in the auditorium – they somehow manage to absorb the dead patch and fold it into their central argument. Everything in a Lano and Woodley show is “a little bit shit”, careening towards a kind of reassuring chaos.
We do get a tiny bit of Melville among the inanity, and it’s quite delicious: Colin uses his briniest radio voice for some descriptions of Ahab stalking the Pequod at night, and there is a brief moment when Moby-Dick is spotted and the call of “Thar she blows!” booms through the theatre. But inevitably, Frank shuffles on with some ludicrous pretext for diversion and the wind literally drops from Colin’s sails. Most of time, the two are mucking around with giant squid costumes or knocking each other out with frypans. When the whale finally does turn up, he’s a hand puppet under a dodgy lighting effect.
Of course, audiences don’t come for Melville. They come for the love/hate comic dynamism of these two overgrown kids, and Moby Dick delivers plenty of opportunity for laughs even while it falls rather spectacularly apart as a work of narrative. Colin hones his tendency to impotent rage, while Frank fine-tunes his holy fool act, and together they make a ramshackle but utterly charming pair of nutters. Audiences might not get to the heart of the 19th-century literary classic, but they will have a (very stupid) whale of a time.
