HOLINESS IN THE WHALE
It pretty much had me harpooned at the words “Call me Ishmael”. As Mark Arends’ earnestly naive schoolteacher speaks the opening lines and begins to pack his carpet-bag, it is clear that this production of Herman Melville”s classic is properly in love with the novel’s strange, harsh nobility.
Fleet though it is – two hours including interval, and shorn of 19c orotundity – adaptor Sebastian Armesto of Simple8 and director Jesse Jones respect it in every way: in language and attitude, its sense of the ocean’s rootless people and their rough lives of threat and beauty, and the manic obsession of Captain Ahab. By the time Ishmael has bedded down nervously with Queequeg the Polynesian “savage’ (Tom Swale), and been made a fool of with his patronizing preconceptions, I’m sold, five minutes in. It wouild have taken a lot for this beautifully created show to lose me.
It never does. With rare delicacy the scenes aboard blend with shanties, hymns, and ballads, always perfectly judged: the loss of Franklin, the Greenland Whale, Will your Anchor Hold. A final hymn after the disaster sets your hairs on edge. Nine actor-musicians are casually expert with accordion, fiddle and guitar. The ship is created with stark economy but its scaffolding and planks are more than capable of evoking a square-rigger’s world (I have sailed as crew on several: it feels right, understated and businesslike, as the crew clamber, haul and hasten, positioning planks as decks and lowering rowing-whalers).
You are drawn deep into a world twenty thousand miles from home by Rachel Nanyanjo’s carefully choreographed movement and , not least, Johanna Town’s remarkably created lighting: a man-overboard moment is shockingly arresting, suddenly and profoundly expressing the emptiness of any comrade’s death. When the watch below turn uneasily , woken from sleep by the thump of Ahab’s ivory leg, you’re with them. At the terrible red rain of bloody victory falls from their first whale and the crew settle to the horrid routine of flaying and boiling you shudder with the wondering newcomer Ishmael: “Fear, joy, guilt..what does it mean?
And then, turning schoolmaster, he explains in another beautifully economical piece of staging the marvel of the precious, terrifying head. As the oldest crewman says, reproving the gung-ho hostility of a young harpooner, “there’s a holiness to a whale”.
We are haunted by unseen whales as much as they are; the great creature that took his leg obsesses Ahab, the veteran with his charts who “knows their hidden journeys as I know the veins in my hands” .Guy Rhys, in his impossible ivory leg, plays it quietly terrifying in his steadfast quest for vengeance. Hannah Emanuel’s decently sensible, homesick Starbuck protests at his crazy extension of the journey, risking the loss of the cargo – “what we came twenty thousnd miles to get is worth saving!” . Tension builds. The men josh and argue, but when one harpooner makes claim to “my whale” a wiser says angrily “A whale is his own beast!”.
Armesto’s skill is in picking, from the huge book, these shiveringly sacred moments. Ishmael himself sees the grandeur of the whale as alongside “Elizabeth the first, Shakespeare..” The tight, versatile, skilled ensemble play out the fearful tale; you can’t take your eyes off it. Melville drew no trite moral and nor does this rendering: humans have always survived by hunting wild creatures and felt that shiver of kinship, mystery and terror. Two hundred years ago whale oil lit most of the world’s lamps and oiled its machinery, whale blubber made soaps, ointments and food and the world in return hunted them almost to extinction. But even the most savage hunters of every century have tasted the grievous mystery, wonder and sorrow which Melville found long ago, as a green-hand in a forecastle. It is a deep eternal sense to share, and this beautiful production achieves it.
royalandderngate.co.uk to 13 April
rating 5
Then touring to 22 June: Perth, Wiltons, Ipswich, Northern Stage, St Mary’s, Blackpool, York, Malvern, Oxford Playhouse.
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