BWW Reviews: MOBY DICK, Arcola Theatre, April 2 2013

Whaling was, and probably still is, an extraordinary business. Men would leave Nantucket USA to sail the oceans in search of the mystical beasts, normally placid, yet fearfully dangerous when riled. After three years away, they would return home with their spoils - at least the lucky ones would - and some semblance of normality would return to their lives. But the sea, and its floating, diving, spouting bounty, would call again.

In Simple8's Moby Dick (at the Arcola Theatre until 4 May), director Sebastian Armesto focuses on two of the novel's key themes: how humans create a culture that deals with adversity; and how obsession can consume a mind. The men sing, drink and tease but respect a hierarchy of command knowing that the sea, the whale and the captain are bigger than all of them. Disagreements flare and fade like the waves - nature always has the upper hand.

Captain Ahab is distant, other, of the sea, not the land, his every movement signalled by the crack of his ivory leg on the deck, making him omnipresent, like the waves. He seeks revenge for the leg lost to the great white whale, but it soon becomes more than revenge - it becomes a pathological need to justify his own life by taking the whale's.

Drawing on a sailing ship's ever-shifting configuration, set designer Simon Allison has his actors create their ship on stage, trimming sails as the wind rises and falls. There's a sense of movement, of a contingent state, of a ship and a stage that might be consumed at any moment. And of the malevolence of the unseen white whale. A few pieces of wood conjure a world.

As Ishmael, the everyman narrator, Sargon Yelda shows how it's possible to be ordinary in extraordinary circumstances. Nicholas Bishop (Starbuck) feels the doom approaching, but cannot muster a proper challenge to his captain. Lording it over the crew if not the sea, Joseph Kloska invests his Ahab with a seductive mix of charisma and madness that recalled Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. You know why his men follow him unto the very maw of their nemesis - you almost wonder if they want to.

If this production does justice to the novel's psychological depth, it also provides rich entertainment through its songs, the occasional comic/tragic encounters with other seafarers and the humour that men use to get along in confined spaces. The ensemble cast give us men in whom we can believe, in whom we trust and for whom we feel when the final reckoning with the whale comes. And it made me want to read the book - the sure marker of a successful adaptation.