Youghal, which served as the location for New Bedford in the 1956 film of 'Moby Dick', hosts the story again tonight when a stage adaptation of Moby Dick opens. CONOR LOVETT, who performs the show, explains why Herman Meville's novel is as gripping today as when it was written
MOBY DICKIS a huge novel. A masterpiece of literature with a gripping plot, a cast of amazing characters, a mythic monster, themes of life, death, vengeance, industry and the questioning of an interventionist god. A road movie on a ship, with an obsessive sea captain, a noble pagan, a pious first mate and a young adventurer and supporting characters that include a drunken landlord, a ragged docklands prophet, a happy-go-lucky second mate, a pugnacious third-mate and about 25 other motley crewmen. All against the backdrop of a whaling voyage across three oceans and as round an education in the business of 19th century whaling that you could wish for.
All this and some of the most fluid, beautiful and romantic descriptive writing ever put to paper. “It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea seemed hardly separable in that all pervading azure. Hither and thither on high glided the snow-white wings of small unspeckled birds. These were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air. But too and fro in the deep, far below in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, swordfish and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thoughts of the masculine sea.”
THROUGHOUT THE next two months Gare St Lazare Players Ireland will present our newest production, an adaptation of Herman Melville's great novel Moby Dick, in 28 theatres and arts centres around Ireland. We will play at Drogheda Arts Festival, Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast and Listowel Writers' Week. We will play in Athlone, Ballina, Belfast, Birr, Bray, Castlebar, Cork, Dingle, Dundalk, Dún Laoghaire, Drogheda, Galway, Kilkenny, Kilmallock, Kilworth, Letterkenny, Limerick, Listowel, Manorhamilton, Naas, Portlaoise, Sligo, Tallaght, Tinahely, Thurles, Waterford, Wexford and Youghal. To each of these places we will bring a story that takes place almost entirely at sea between Nantucket Island and the Japanese whale-cruising grounds.
Depending on the edition, Moby Dickis between 540 and 600 pages long. Our adaptation, made by co-artistic director Judy Hegarty Lovett (the director) and myself (the actor) is almost 16 A4 pages. It will run approximately two hours of stage time with a 10-minute interval.
The impetus to do this is easy to explain. Judy and I, and Gare St Lazare Players Ireland have already presented nine prose pieces by Samuel Beckett to theatre audiences with a good deal of success. Of these only three were full length novels. Of these, one – Molloy, the first one we did – is almost an entire 10- or 12-page section from early in the first part of the novel. With the other two – Malone Diesand The Unnamable– we began at the beginning and ended at the end and tried to give a good sense of the in-between. But it's fair to say that the plot in each case, how shall I say, wasn't the most important aspect of the novel.
In each case we don’t consider them adaptations and we never wrote, let alone uttered, a word, not to mind a sentence, that Beckett didn’t write. These versions, and their subsequent presentation (as the Beckett trilogy), we are really very pleased with. Our impetus has always been to share with an audience writing that has moved us profoundly.
Both Judy and I read Moby Dickfor the first time within the last 12 months. We came to the novel knowing very well that John Huston's film version was made in Youghal. Judy read it first and raved about it to me. She was about halfway through it when she suggested we do it for the stage. I remember thinking I'd better read it then.
We originally thought about asking a writer to adapt it, someone who could make sure the final script had a good arc to it. Then we decided we should do it ourselves. We felt that with our prior experience we could serve the work well and could best bring our original love for it directly to an audience. It would be easier to make changes quickly in rehearsal and we felt well equipped as we’d have a good sense of what would and wouldn’t work theatrically. After all with a writer like Melville (as with Beckett) the best work had already been done.
By premiering the work in Youghal we are marking another adaptation – the huge impact that Huston's project had in that town and in Ireland. As the cinematic version of the Pequodlaunched from that port, so too is this theatrical version being launched.
We had planned to begin the adaptation last November, just after booking the tour. It is a break from our norm to book a tour before creating a production. Last year we did it for the first time with Samuel Beckett's First Loveand probably buoyed by the success of that, we forgot that we dont normally do it. I exaggerate, we didn't forget, but we certainly jumped into booking that tour in a way we wouldn't normally do.
Our norm would be to produce a show, present it somewhere – a festival, a short run, a European Capital of Culture – and then, once we knew we could stand behind it and live with it and work on it further, we would look at touring. Probably by booking a tour, and in particular a tour of 35 or so performances in 28 venues over two months, we were giving ourselves a very good reason to make sure we went and adapted the thing properly.
Anyway, we had planned to start last November but we were invited, quite late in the day, to bring First Loveto New York in January, and that took a lot of planning. So we didn't get onto the adaptation until mid-January and I began learning lines even before we finished the adaptation and we started rehearsing at the top of February. This overlap seems to have been good for the project and has intensified the process for us.
THE PROCESS OF working on Moby Dickhas been much the same as our usual. I learn the text and then Judy directs me. We spend hours rehearsing and laughing and arguing and discussing and marvelling at the awesome skill and breadth and vision of this amazing writer.
At this point in time, to reflect on it is interesting. When the show goes on the road we will go into the phase of jamming and playing and fine-tuning and discovering and eventually re-learning and re-hearing and then starting as if from scratch to perform the entire thing.
I will eventually become very, very familiar with the nightly journey. I will forget, for example, that there was a time on this project when I had forgotten how to act and I had forgotten why we were doing this.
In the thick of rehearsal it is easy to lose sight of one’s own vision. Gare St Lazare’s vision is about making the text your own so that you perform it as if it is your words, your story, your truth. In this way the actor and director appear to disappear and the audience is left with a direct link to the writer. This process cannot be done by an actor alone nor by a director alone. Luckily I work with a patient director who never loses sight of this vision and is devoted to acting and writing and teaching.
Our lighting designer, Aedin Cosgrove, has been in Youghal rigging lights. Our producer, Maura O'Keeffe, is making the final preparations. These are the exciting moments before the ship shoots from her harbour. Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick, tells it like this: "At noon that Christmas day, when the ships riggers had been dismissed, and the Pequod had been towed away from the wharf and the sails were set, we glided off."
Moby Dickis at the Mall Arts Centre, Youghal, Co Cork, tonight and tomorrow and tours until the end of May
