Brighton Fringe 2025

Moby Dick

Grist To The Mill

Genre: Adaptation, Fringe Theatre, Live Literature, One Person Show, Solo Performance

Venue: The Rotunda Theatre, Regency Square, Brighton BN1 2FG

Festival: Brighton Fringe

Low Down

Review

I’ll call him – Ishmael.

How do you even begin to give a Rotunda audience some of the flavour and intensity of Herman Melville’s classic?   Ross Ericson nailed it very effectively – or I should probably say – ‘harpooned it’ …   He came on to the Rotunda stage in black waistcoat and trousers, over an open-necked white shirt, occasionally taking gulps from a pewter tankard.

The set was minimal – just a few wooden boxes and coils of rope, and a small triangular sail rigged behind him.   At the back of the stage there was a large backdrop of the sea, waves receding towards the horizon, with a cloudy sky above.  That was fixed in place – but as Ross Ericson moved back and forth, the effect was that he seemed to be the unmoving one, while the horizon moved up and down, almost as if we were on a rolling boat in a seaway. 

Looking at Ericson, he’s obviously older than the Ishmael who features in the book – but that’s the point: Ishmael survives the events (he’s the only one of the crew who does) and he is telling us this tale many years later.  And the book itself begins with the narrator asking us to “Call me Ishmael.”    The biblical origin of that name means ‘orphan’ or ‘outcast’, and indeed the theme of lost children comes up in several instances in the story.

‘Moby Dick’ is a vast creation – five hundred and seventy-seven pages in my hardback copy, and that’s without an Introduction or Notes.  It’s far more than just the tale of Captain Ahab’s obsessive quest for the White Whale – it’s an encyclopedic overview of the nineteenth century whaling industry.   Those hundreds of pages contain essays on the sea, on the whales themselves (my volume has fifteen pages alone devoted to what Melville calls ‘Cetology’ – eleven different species of whale, their lives and habits, along with illustrations), on whaling vessels, on the killing and processing of the creatures to produce whale-oil. 

And, of course, on the seamen themselves: both at sea, and in their home port of Nantucket.

Ross Ericson has constructed this production using only Herman Melville’s words, though giving us what’s obviously a massively abridged version of the book.  As Ahab’s lines at the review’s introduction make clear – it’s about one man’s obsessive thirst for revenge on the whale that took off his leg during a previous voyage.   As some audience members might not know the story well, Ericson wisely starts with a section about how that terrible mutilation occurred (still with all lines taken from Melville’s text) before some accordion music (we could visualise a crew member playing, sat on a cask on the foredeck) led us into the book’s actual beginning – “Call me Ishmael”

So we join ‘Ishmael’, as he decides to join a whaling ship, the Pequod, out of Nantucket.  We meet the tattooed harpooneer Queequeg, from the South Seas, who becomes his comrade.  Subsequently we are introduced to other members of the ship’s crew : Starbuck and Stubb, the First and Second Mates; Tashtego and Daggoo, the other harpooners, and eventually the powerful Fedallah, an Indian Parsee who is Ahab’s confidante.   

Not just their names, either – Ericson didn’t simply recite lines from the book; he took on the various accents and speech patterns of each character when they spoke in the story, as well as some of their physical postures.  Introducing all these was the soft American speech he employed for the lines he spoke as the narrator.  He’d asked to be called ‘Ishmael’, but I felt he should be called ‘Legion’, as he was so many…    Captain Ahab doesn’t appear at first, but his presence pervades every inch of the vessel.    When he does finally surface from below deck; it’s to energise his crew, as we saw at the beginning of this review, like some Old Testament preacher.  

Because Ross Ericson’s used the author’s own lines, the production gives us more than just the story – we get a real feel of Melville’s vivid, often poetic, use of language:

at the end of the first day chasing the whale  –  ‘The day gathered up its golden hem’

and again, when we see a harpoon lodged in the back of the White Whale  — ‘like to some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy’

Bringing a long, multi-faceted book to the stage, especially one as dense as ‘Moby Dick’, could have been a tedious experience for the audience –  this Grist To The Mill production was anything but.  It seemed that for an hour we’d been in the presence of Ishmael himself, and had Herman Melville’s beautiful prose ringing in our ears.

My fellow audience member, who’s never read ‘Moby Dick’, declared that she’d found it “exhilarating’’ – I think that after this production it’s going to feature on her ‘to read’ list …

Published May 9, 2025May 9, 2025 by Strat Mastoris