Earth is near dead, so exploited it barely sustains humanity. Wealthy individuals live in the last habitable places, running large corporations that head off-world to find new resources, repeating the pillage across the solar system.
A young woman, born in an impoverished land, is invited onto an intergalactic spaceship to make her fortune. To paraphrase the opening line of the classic novel Moby Dick: call her Ishmael.
When Herman Melville wrote his whale-hunting tale, first published in 1851, the oceans seemed limitless, forever amenable to exploitation. In Dead Puppet Society’s stage adaptation Ishmael, premiering 170 years later at Brisbane festival and coinciding with a billionaire race to space, the climate refugees aboard the MV (mining vessel) Pequod may again be about to catastrophically miscalculate the natural resources ahead.
The Brisbane-based Dead Puppet Society, formed in 2008, often creates large-scale, highly technical and immersive theatre, with actors performing alongside puppets. In this case, little is writ large: live camera feeds and projection screens make tiny stage sets enormous and cinematic, combined with animation, lighting, sound and smoke effects.
Ishmael stars Ellen Bailey in the title role, with Barbara Lowing as Captain Ahab, Grubb, Coffin and Rachel, and Patrick Jhanur as Queequeg. The three actors alternate performing centre-stage with standing to the stage’s side, manipulating miniature worlds by way of 35 rotating diorama models laser cut from plywood and acrylic, assisted by two technicians.
Flying plywood spaceships just a millimetre thick loom large as the live-feed cameras swoop into the dioramas to deliver moving images on a filmic backdrop throughout the production. “It’s sort of like we’re making a film, but backwards,” says writer, director and co-designer David Morton.
“It’s amazing how real a 10mm-long spaceship flying towards the camera feels when backed up with animation and subwoofers under the stage roaring. This spaceship that is quarter the size of a matchbox feels like, if you got too close, it would fry you.”
The entire production was fully storyboarded almost a year ago, and dozens of people wrote customised computer code to drive the action through each performance. Indie pop artist Bec Sandridge, who has a “Kate Bush-esque voice”, composed a synth score based on the script that is the “beating heart of the production”, says Dead Puppet Society executive director Nick Paine.
Morton and Paine – who are life partners, having married in New York in 2014 – met when they were studying drama at Queensland University of Technology, they tell Guardian Australia via Zoom from their Brisbane home.
In 2007, during a unit in their second university year, students were asked to pick a director to study from a list. Morton asked his lecturer if he could study Julie Taymor, the founding director of The Lion King on stage. Paine, he was told, was doing the same. “So then we had coffee,” Morton says, grinning, “and the rest is history”.
In 2008, the pair scanned the Brisbane theatre industry for artistic gaps for an assignment, and together proposed starting a puppetry company, alighting on the company name by inserting the word “puppet” into movie titles, including Australian director Peter Weir’s 1989 film Dead Poets Society. “In the literature around puppetry the idea of the dead puppet is the object that has no life but is full of potential,” Morton explains.
The pair gained valuable experience at South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, best known for the stage version of War Horse, and later at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn to develop their original production The Wider Earth, reimagining Darwin’s journey. These themes resurface in Ishmael. “I think a lot of us have lost that romantic connection with the natural world,” Morton says. “What happens if we continue down this route?”
Ishmael echoes the current class divide, emphasising the inequality that will grow in the future. The gender flipping of the narrator’s role might be read as a comment on the aggressive masculine pursuit of unfettered growth. “She finds herself offered an opportunity to make her fortune – whether or not she goes through with that is another matter,” Morton says.
Ishmael’s first planned season – in 2020 at Brisbane festival followed by the Sydney Opera House – was scuttled by the pandemic. It will likely have a national and international tour, but not until 2023.
• Ishmael is showing at the Cremorne Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, from 3 to 18 September.
