Gare St Lazare Players venture into perilous waters with their new production, an adaptation of Herman Melville's epic novel. Actor Conor Lovett and director Judy Hegarty-Lovett have distilled the multi-layered account of a catastrophic whaling expedition into a two-hour monologue, staged in an austerely minimal style.
On a stripped black stage, with a small table the only prop, Conor Lovett takes the role of the novel's narrator, the pensive sailor Ishmael. He recalls joining the crew of a whaling ship, the Pequod, and his first impressions of its captain, "crazy Ahab". Much of the first half describes Ishmael's last night on land, and here the necessity to portray a range of characters creates problems. In the voice of Ishmael, Lovett keeps his mild Cork accent, but the switch to American intonations is jarring. It seems like a long preamble, too: anyone who knows the story will be impatient for the voyage to begin.
As he has established in his riveting performances of Beckett's monologues, Lovett's capacity to hold an audience is remarkable. His voice control and subtle shifts of expression and movement seem effortless. But even his impressive technique cannot overcome difficulties of scale the company set themselves here. The teeming voices of the novel are lost: the sailors' slang, the biblical cadences and Shakespearean flourishes are restrained into a quiet narrative. While there are moments that do justice to Melville's philosophical questioning and startling renderings of sky and sea, the piece seems more like a recitation than a dramatic embodiment. The Leviathan has eluded capture - again.
• At Source Arts Centre, Thurles, tonight. Box office: +353 504 90204. Then touring.
