Moby Dick

Review by Ryan

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Some may think that a live staging of Moby Dick in 85 minutes is ambitious at a minimum, and while you would be right, this production achieves it's ambitious task.

Telling the story of revenge, ambition and ultimately a narrative of death, Moby Dick by Plexus Polaire is nothing short of a creative feast.

Replacing most of the cast with humanoid puppets, the story focuses on Ishmael and his journey with Captain Ahab on a whaling ship. We meet various characters along the way and witness impressive staging to bring the ocean alive on stage. While inventive, original and well worth seeing, the puppets creating the boat, whales and further elements of the vast ocean were slightly underwhelming in scale. The trouble with tackling a stage such as this is there is a lot of space to fill and unfortunately the majority of the action was set far back with a lot of the space completely underutilised. It would have been great for some of the puppetry, particularly the whale, to be much larger to utilise the amount of space available.

This said, the ability to entrance the entire audience into such a deafening silence was extremely impressive and immersed the audience into the atmosphere of the show. The atmosphere was unmatched at anything I've seen before.

Part of the atmospheric success is due to the impressive band which featured Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen, Guro Skumsnes Moe and Havard Skaset who developed cinematic soundscapes live to accompany the action on stage.

Blurring the lines of fantasy and encapsulating elements of the iconic novel, the embodiment of death on stage increased the macabre essence of this theatrical delight. Although there was some dialogue to pass along the plot, a lot of the vocal elements were spectacular live vocals or droning, increasing the underscoring and cementing this production firmly as an atmosphere masterpiece.

A mesmerising and hauntingly atmospheric endeavour to stage the mammoth novel at the Barbican.