Spymonkey’s Moby Dick

By Sarah Hemming

Published: May 3 2010 03:00 | Last updated: May 3 2010 03:00

“Call me Ishmael,” says our narrator at the beginning of the evening. That much is familiar. But I don’t think Herman Melville managed to squeeze quite so many sight gags and running jokes into his epic novel as Spymonkey does. In this deliberately garbled stage adaptation of the tale of Captain Ahab (or Captain Kebab as he is dubbed here) and his crazed pursuit of the whale, the cast mangles the text, bungles the drama and produces a couple of hours of enjoyable nonsense.

The premise is a pretty common one. The company plays a fictitious, inept theatre group that takes on the telling of a great classic and makes a hash of it. Here the aspiring “Compagnie Tony Parks”, headed by actor-manager Tony Parks (Toby Park) – a big fish in a small pond – attempts to tell the tale with just four actors, slender resources and an even slimmer grasp of dignity. It doesn’t help that one of the acting quartet is a woman (Petra Massey), who keeps trying to break her way into a narrative that is noticeably short on female characters, and that one (Aitor Basauri) has a nigh impenetrable foreign accent. He informs us, beaming, that he is to play the narrator because we will all “have to pay more attention”.

There are plenty of entertaining gags – the lamp that won’t blow out, the tankard stuck to the table – in Jos Houben’s production. And Stephan Kreiss as the harpooner Queequeg offers a masterclass in slapstick. Elsewhere there’s meta-theatrical comedy, as one crew member notices that they are sailing the oceans with only half a boat and as Massey takes to bursting on stage wearing only red stilettos and a few strategically placed rubber rings. And the company seizes on the marketing opportunity for “Aloe Sailor” bubble bath.

It’s harmless fun and very jolly. The drawback, though, is that that is all it is. This is a talented crew: you begin to feel that they could produce something more original with a bigger goal. Once it becomes apparent that nothing more is on offer, the show becomes becalmed and the cast just a little too eager to raise a laugh. Still, you will probably have to sail the seven seas to find another example of a macho stand-off over who can best imitate a whale’s underwater call.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.