AHAB: Whiteness, terror…
PIP: Whiteness…and ghosts…and ghosts are white…
AHAB: Ghosts, riding in a milk white fog…
The muffled rollings of the milky sea;
Bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts
Of mountains; and the desolate shiftings
Of the windrowed snows of prairies…
And of whiteness – all of whiteness –
The Albino whale has been my symbol!
D’ye wonder at my fiery hunt?
“Call me Ishmael…” - so begins one of the defining tales of human literature, Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, Moby Dick, a work of overwhelming imagination about the great struggle to defeat the nothingness – the whiteness - the encroaching terror of why we are alive, what is our faith worth, how do we perceive the world? Aboard the hauntingly atmospheric ship, the Pequod, we get the world in little, a social commentary, an extraordinary adventure and a paean to the sea and it’s most powerful fish, to whaling lore and legend.
For those who have not read Moby Dick in years or have never wet their feet, it is an example of the very greatest poetry ever put to paper – exquisitely playful, funny, barbaric, soul-shunting and desperate. To see it on stage is a miracle of theatricality, the power of the spoken word, and the skill of the actor – an adventure where poetry is the captain and all of us the ocean. Director Adam Cook brings Orson Welles ingenious adaptation of Moby Dick to the stage for Sport for Jove in 2018.
“Are there no hearts above the snowline?
O ye frozen heaven! Look down here…”
An extraordinary introduction to what theatre can be, to great literature and to ambition and madness of the human spirit.
Moby Dick
By Orson Welles
An adaptation of the novel by Herman Melville
Directed by Adam Cook
Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre
August 9 – 25, 2018
