“Why does the living persist in reducing the dead to silence? will launch like a leitmotiv Ismaël (Pierre Devérines), narrator and sole survivor of this tragic epic written in the 19th century by Herman Melville. Created in 2020 by the Franco-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire, the immense Moby-Dick offers itself in a puppet and multidisciplinary adaptation that literally plunges the viewer into the heart of the sea and its tumults.
Odyssey on human nature, on this unhealthy obsession to go to the end of oneself, Moby-Dick is a fable about human folly, anger and the blinding spirit of revenge. Lost, lonely, emptied of everything, Ishmael embarks on the Pequod in order to embrace the sea and its possibilities. There he meets a crew blinded by the mission of Ahab, this irascible captain once crippled by the giant sperm whale. Together, against all odds, despite the certainty of the fatal outcome raised by Ishmael, the crew rushes straight ahead, determined to stand up to the giant.
Imagined by Yngvild Aspeli, artistic director of the company Plexus Polaire, Moby-Dick brings to light with ingenuity the unsuspected stubbornness of man. In a staging as disproportionate as the cetacean, Yngvild Aspeli invites spectators to experience the legend from the inside. And it’s succeeded thanks to the chorus of six actor-puppeteers who act as shadows, ghosts, men and women carried away by the big blue, to surgically manipulated puppets – to such an extent that ‘they merge with the human — and with the projections. Everything is carried by the music, a character in itself, played on stage by two musicians. The double bass player, Guro Skumsnes Moe (who is reminiscent of Jorane) and the guitarist, Håvard Skaset, singers moreover, recreate with as much delicacy as ardor the creaking of the boat, the blowing of the wind, the song of the whales and other offshore sounds.
The first painting is striking in this regard. Blue projections imitate the sea and occupy the entire scenic space in which a few white fish move. The impression of being under water is total.
Play with sizes
The captain’s relentlessness, madness, as Einstein said, which is to always do the same thing hoping for a different result, is offered with great concern for theatricality. Oversized in relation to the human, the puppet that represents Ahab reflects this excess, this blindness that will lead to his downfall. Projections imitating the map on which the captain regularly looks to find Moby Dick constantly return during the show, a symbol of this quest which goes around in circles and which will lead nowhere.
If Ahab is often larger than life, the whaler, huge at first, is reduced to a small model when he faces the titanic beast on the high seas. The marriage of the different disciplines contributes to offer a spectacle as grandiose as the legend which has already been given a standing ovation by the people of the Diamond, completely dazzled and fascinated by so much grandeur and magic. Gorgeous.