Orson Welles’ Moby Dick – Rehearsed will mark its 70th anniversary with a six-night run in Rome.
Under the direction of Elio De Capitani, the two-act play, an adaptation of the Herman Melville novel, is being staged at the Theatre Vascello on March 11-16. Welles’ text for Moby Dick – Rehearsed has been translated into Italian by Cristina Viti.
The performance space will be dominated by an enormous, yet light, iridescent and changeable backdrop, capable of evoking the immensity of the sea and the looming presence of the white whale. De Capitani previously helmed Moby Dick – Alla Prova at the Elfo Puccini in Milan in 2022.
“Shakespearean blank verse, an extreme synthesis of the novel, beautiful characters, masterfully rendered and sung parts,” De Capitani recently told la Repubblica. “We have created this ‘total’ show, with the added joy of an impossible final challenge: the appearance of the sperm whale. And with a simple theatrical trick we managed to create it on stage.”
Welles first performed Moby Dick – Rehearsed on June 16, 1955 at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London. It is play-with-a-play that finds a Shakespearean acting company rehearsing King Lear when their director asks them to stage Moby Dick. The actors use their imagination to create the illusion of the whaling ship, the ocean, and the great white whale.
The 1955 production starred Welles, Patrick McGoohan, Kenneth Williams and Joan Plowright. Welles filmed between 40 and 75 minutes of the production with much of the original cast at the Hackney Empire and Scala theaters in London. Christopher Lee was brought in to sub for Peter Sallis as Stage Manager/Flask.
Welles hoped to sell the finished product to CBS’ Omnibus, which had presented a live abridged version of King Lear directed by Peter Brooks and starring Welles in 1953. However, Welles was unhappy with the initial results and quickly abandoned the idea.
“We shot for three days and it was obvious it wasn’t going to be any good, so we stopped,” Welles told biographer Barbara Leaming. “There was no film made at all. We only did one and a half scenes. I said, ‘Let’s not go on and waste our money, because it’s not going to be any good.’”
In his autobiography, Williams said the dim atmospheric stage lighting rendered some of the footage shot by Welles to be unusable.
“It was to be a film of the play and from the outset Orson was at loggerheads with the lighting cameraman, who vainly protested that theatrical arc lamps were insufficient for filming. ‘You’re not Rembrandt painting with light,’ he was told. ‘Shoot the scene’. When the rushes revealed stygian gloom, it had to be filmed all over again,” Williams wrote.
However, fellow co-star McGoohan in 1986 recalled watching 40 minutes of rushes three decades earlier and being impressed.
While the stage production of Moby Dick – Rehearsed ran from June 16 to July 9, 1955, it did not mark the end of Welles’ interest in the Melville classic.
He played Father Mapple in director John Huston’s big screen version of Moby Dick in 1956. Fifteen years later, Welles filmed 22 minutes of various scenes from the play, reading all of the parts himself. The surviving footage of that film was acquired and restored by the Munich Film Museum.
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