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Moby Dick review

  • Theatre, Drama
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
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Time Out says

3 out of 5 stars

Sport for Jove takes on the white whale with this production of Herman Melville's classic

Forget Fallout, the real Mission Impossible is happening right now inside the Reginald, the smallest space inside the Seymour Centre. The brief: take a famously dense novel that not only travels the high seas but the innermost depths of the human condition and condense it to an 80 minute black box theatre production that feels fresh, new and accessible. Who would ever choose to accept? 

Enter Sport for Jove, the popular Sydney independent company that specialises in classic texts through new eyes. Under the direction of Adam Cook, they’ve given it a good crack. The script is an existing one by Moby Dick obsessive Orson Welles, which he half-filmed but ended up abandoning when it didn’t live up to his expectations. Here, Sport for Jove take it through to its turbulent ends.

It’s still the story you know, if abridged: the one about Ishmael (Tom Royce-Hampton) who boards the Pequod on a whaling voyage out of Nantucket. The captain is still Ahab (Danny Adcock), obsessed with that white whale Moby Dick, the one who tore off his leg. (There are, thankfully, no whale suits.)

Welles riffs on Sport for Jove’s beloved Shakespeare by referencing Henry V in the script – inviting the audience to build the ocean in their imaginations. Welles’ script has been pared down from two hours to a run time of 80 minutes, excising its play-within-a-play premise, which saw actors preparing for a performance of King Lear until, under the behest of a tyrannical actor – the Ahab of the group – they abandon it to tackle Moby Dick. In this production, we leap straight into the plot as it begins in Melville’s novel: with a wandering soul entering a pub full of sailors, looking for a place to rest his head before boarding a whaling ship.

But Welles’ original DIY feel remains in Mark Thompson’s wood-paneled, minimal set. Whale sightings and slayings play out on ladders as boats and oars and beasts; Gavan Swift’s lights create drama and momentum. These aren’t the only exploratory, interpretive elements of the production: whaling is underscored by drumming; Starbuck, Pip and Tashtago are played by women (Francesca Savige, Rachel Alexander, and Vaishnavi Suryaprakash); Queegueq is played a woman too – Wendy Mocke – but is also played as a woman, and has been given a defined heritage and language (Mocke’s own Papua New Guinean identity), crafted with sensitivity and specificity by Cook and Mocke.

Under Cook’s direction, which darts curiously across genre and performance style, the play leans heavily on the heart; Ryan Patrick Devlin’s sound design sings the creaking of a ship and the rush of waves, and he crafts tenderness around little tragedies: the unravelling of young Pip, the crisis of Queegqueg, the burdens of Starbuck.

But the production never quite unites to be more than the sum of its parts. Ishmael is more drummer and occasional poet than what could have been our anchor, and Ahab, played by Adcock in all textures of a howl from its forceful beginning to throat-cracked end, is an uneven force. The meeting of musical, physical theatre and poetry recitation feels clumsy and ad-hoc, but well-intentioned; there’s a hint of wild beauty that suggests, if not emulates, Melville’s prose.

This is an ambitious production that tries to tell one of our biggest classic stories in an immediate, urgent way. It doesn’t quite work. But you have to admire them for trying with all their hearts, and there’s beauty in seeing those hearts onstage grappling with something bigger than themselves. It’s a bit like life.

Written by
Cassie Tongue

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$26-$45
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