Theater: Captain Bligh Swaps Ships

Moby Dick is an Orson Welles adaptation, some of it in blank verse, of Melville’s novel. Some men tinker with old cars; Orson Welles tinkers with old masterpieces. His 1937 Julius Caesar, in Fascist uniform, was exciting theater. Moby Dick is a fiasco.

Perhaps no theater is large enough to hold the White Whale, and Welles intelligently lets audience imagination do the work of stage realism. He conceives of a turn-of-the-century acting troupe doing a sort of tryout rehearsal of a new drama, Moby Dick. A tall ladder serves for a mast, benches for longboats, and furled and swaying sails complete the Nantucket whaler Pequod. Pages of the novel are cut to stage cues, and the second and final act cuts to the mortal sea chase, which Director Douglas Campbell handles with brisk and believable intensity.

But Moby Dick is the voyage of a soul as well as a ship, and that journey goes willfully off course. What is missing is the tragic sense. Captain Ahab is an authentic tragic hero; Welles makes him merely a monomaniac of vengeance. In book and play, Ahab speaks of the “malice inscrutable” of the White Whale. His mate Starbuck, the voice of reason, reminds him that “a poor dumb thing” can have no malice. What Welles fails to grasp is that it is the inscrutability that maddens Ahab, for Moby Dick is the universal mystery of things as they are. When Ahab probes with his lance for the great whale’s heart, he seeks to know the secret of the universe, striving, in the same moment, to destroy the neutral, unresponsive “whiteness” of all that is impervious to man. Like all great tragic heroes, Ahab dies in the glory and blasphemy of a rebellious pride that will not accept a universe that is not man-centered. And since the tragic hero bears with him the stifled rebellion of lesser men, his death is awesomely like a crucifixion.

Scarcely an inkling of this filters through Rod Steiger’s Ahab. He thumps, rants and bellows in good voice, but he is merely Captain Bligh, shifted from the quarterdeck of the Bounty to the dooms-deck of the Pequod.