Moby-Dick

Sebastian Armesto, Herman Melville

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781849435109
• eBook ISBN: 9781849433990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Performance Art
• Index: Literature

'It's true. It's all true for Moby-Dick. He's a killer, he's a fury, he's an angel of hell. Why if the white whale could talk he'd talk like Ahab.'
Nantucket. 1851. Centre of a whaling industry that transformed blubber into the oils and candles that lit the world. It's there that a schoolmaster called Ishmael arrives to ship on a whale-boat. He enrols under Ahab, Captain of the Pequod – a man bent on destroying the white whale that lost him his leg. Certain the destruction of his nemesis will slake his thirst; Ahab's single-minded pursuit of Moby-Dick consumes Ishmael, the crew and the Pequod itself.
The spirit and atmosphere of Herman Melville's masterpiece – romantic, ambiguous, characterful and rich with allegory – is captured.

Some actors wander on stage and start to set up. The stage is awash with the usual sort of bric-a-brac that ends up in an old theatre – chairs, sound effect stuff, dusty costumes, ladders, boxes, piles of books, barrels, bits of wood, fans, a lighting tower, curtains and tabs. The actors shift the stuff around, positioning it.

The company could start to change out of their street clothes and modern jackets to reveal the broken-down, seafaring clothes they’re to wear for the show.

Stuff happens to show that it is a company of actors attempting to do Moby-Dick. They should establish a contract with the audience and get in a bit of the etymology and biology of the whale. Something like:

ACTOR 1: Evening everyone. It’s all right, we haven’t started yet. Just – sorting stuff out. We’re going to be doing this. (Produces a copy of Moby-Dick.) It’s the sort of book people pretend to have read, so if you haven’t read it, this will help you pretend that you’ve read it and wing it a bit if it crops up in conversation. We’ve read it, so you don’t have to.

ACTOR 2: I haven’t.

ACTOR 1: Keith hasn’t. He’s dyslexic. He’s never read a book.

KEITH: I have.

ACTOR 1: Anyway –

KEITH: Paul McKenna, Change Your Life in Seven Days.

ACTOR 3: Did it?

KEITH: Dunno. Took me three months to finish.

ACTOR 1: Anyway, we’ve filled Keith in so he knows all about it –

KEITH: It’s about a w-hale.

Actor 1. The ‘h’ is silent.

KEITH: Well it’s about a fish.

ACTOR 4: Mammal.

KEITH is about to protest.

ACTOR 1: He’s right.

ACTOR 5: Come on.

ACTOR 1: Are we ready?

ACTOR 6: I think so.

ACTOR 1: OK. Great. Let’s go.

The actors have assembled in a semi-circle. ACTOR 4 steps forward.

ISHMAEL: Call me Ishmael.

He rolls his shoulders. It wasn’t quite right. Maybe he looks around for assurance and someone shakes their head and says ‘too jolly’.

ISHMAEL: Call me Ishmael.

The lights fade slowly as he speaks until ISHMAEL stands lit dimly by a spotlight.

ISHMAEL: Some years ago, having no money, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. For whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing outside coffin warehouses; whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately knocking people’s hats off – then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

The sea! (A slow, low maw starts from an accordion.) Why there is some mystical magnetism about it that attracts both seamen and lubbers! I think of Narcissus, tormented by his image reflected in the fountain, grasping at it and drowning in it. That is us! We see our image in all the rivers and oceans – the ungraspable image of life! (The maw stops.)

Now when I say I go to sea I do not mean that I ever go as a passenger. For as passenger you need a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor. True, they order me about some, and if you’ve been lording it as a country schoolmaster, as I have, the transition is a keen one. But it wears off in time.

So I go as a sailor, and as a sailor they pay you! What can compare with that?

As Ishmael speaks the next section the Carpet-Bag is handed to him and the items are passed to him and are packed by unseen hands.

ISHMAEL: My old Carpet-Bag is my only companion. A sturdy, simple hold-all big enough to carry what a traveller needs – a shirt or two, trousers, gloves, a scarf and jacket, some literature – but it’s small enough to make the journey light. That journey was to the stop of most young whaling candidates: Nantucket.

A soft beat of a whaling shanty – ‘I Signed A...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note
• Dedication
• Part I
• Part II
• Epilogue