Having a whale of a time

The Gare St Lazare Players have brought their take on Moby Dick to its home town of New Bedford, says Gerry McCarthy

THE Gare St Lazare players have returned “exhausted and elated” to their Paris base after a ground-breaking tour of New England.

Conor Lovett, acclaimed for his solo performances of texts by Samuel Beckett, and his wife, director Judy Hegarty Lovett, are the nucleus of the company.

After 15 years of touring, they may be Ireland’s most travelled theatre company. With bases in Cork and Paris, they have brought their adaptations of Beckett’s work, including pieces such as Molloy, which were not written for the stage, to all corners of the globe.

Lovett’s stage persona — a diffident, rambling, ageless bundle of verbal tics, with a gentle Cork accent — has been a revelation. The couple has opened a new perspective on Beckett, revealing the theatrical dynamics in writing that had not previously been performed live. After reservations, the Beckett estate has been supportive.

Their latest venture is a change of direction. Gare St Lazare’s production of Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s massive 19th century novel about the pursuit of a great white whale, is a quixotic venture. Melville is everything Beckett is not: Moby Dick is a vast and expansive piece of writing, enormous in scope and encyclopaedic in form. As well as being a sea story, an adventure and a whaling yarn, it is a treatise on the vanished world of New England whalers.

A gigantic universe of a book, Moby Dick seems far from the delicate, sparse minimalism of Beckett’s writing. But Hegarty Lovett, reading Melville, picked up on the strength of its voices, notably the narrator, Ishmael.

The Lovetts originally premiered Moby Dick in Youghal, Co Cork, where John Huston’s film version of the book, with Gregory Peck, Orson Welles, and an Irish cast of extras and supporting players, was largely filmed in 1956.

Their American tour, just completed, was another brave decision by the Lovetts. Its centrepiece was a run in the Massachusetts city of New Bedford. But metaphorically taking coals to Newcastle is the Gare St Lazare house style, from performing Cork-accented Beckett in Paris or bringing the greatest of whaling yarns back to New Bedford.

Lovett approached the text through the voice of the narrator, a ship’s crewman who opens with the famous words ‘Call me Ishmael.’ “The words take care of the character,” he says. “Ishmael is a young man, up for adventure, happy to go whaling but also nervous at the prospect of sailing with Captain Ahab.” Ahab, the stern and obsessive captain of the Pequod, is among the most memorable characters in literature: a scion of Quaker New England, a captain driven to madness by the conviction that he must exact a Biblical revenge on a legendary white whale.

Lovett says Ahab emerges through Ishmael’s description of him, but gradually develops a distinctive voice — “Melville uses Quaker speech like ‘thou’ and ‘dost’ for Ahab. It’s an almost Elizabethan way of speaking, when other characters talk normally. Ahab’s speeches are great Elizabethan soliloquys,” he says.

Lovett laughs at their audacity in bringing an Irish Moby Dick to New Bedford, which has distinctive roots. There were old Quaker whaling and trading families, dating back almost to the Pilgrim Fathers. But the whaling routes and the trade winds led to a strong Portuguese connection in New Bedford — it has a sizeable population of Portuguese origin.

The Lovetts’ performances at the city’s Zeiterion theatre opened up a new set of connections. The people of New Bedford are historically conscious — there is a renowned whaling museum and old buildings have been preserved. Despite Huston’s film, little had previously been made of the connections to Youghal.

Oliver ‘Olly’ Casey, a former mayor of Youghal, had attended the play’s Irish opening, and shared his memories of the film, in which his mother was an extra, with the Lovetts. He produced a set of photographs taken in the 1950s, along with other Moby Dick memorabilia, and the Lovetts suggested that he might like to accompany them to New Bedford. Casey accepted and prepared an illustrated talk that highlighted Youghal’s connections to Massachusetts. His story, complementing Lovett’s performance, was well-received.

There are plans to formally twin Youghal and New Bedford. Other connections have emerged. Lovett mentioned Dónal O’Kelly’s one-man play Catalpa, first performed in 1997. O’Kelly took on a range of voices and roles to tell the story of a 19th century whaling ship from New Bedford, the Catalpa, which rescued Irish Fenian prisoners from a penal colony in Western Australia. There is talk of a revival, as a new set of artistic connections with Ireland is forged in New England.

A film is also in the pipeline. Lovett says it could be described as “a documentary without a narrator.” Videographer Myles O’Reilly travelled to the USA with the Gare St Lazare troupe, and filmed them on and off stage, along with recordings of the fiddle playing of Caoimhin O’Raghallaigh, who accompanies Lovett live during performances of Moby Dick.

“Myles does his own thing,” says Lovett, “so I’m just guessing. But it could be a kind of documentary, based on images, sound and music.”

Ireland’s most well-travelled theatre company has no plans to sit still. The original Irish tour of Moby Dick took in venues with maritime connections, not always on the regular theatre circuit. They played in Baltimore, Co Cork, and Bray, Co Wicklow. A return to larger urban venues is planned. Meanwhile, it’s back to Beckett for the couple, and a hugely ambitious programme: Lovett perform all three texts from the Beckett Trilogy — Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable — on the main stage in Cork Opera House, while simultaneously staging a fourth Beckett piece in the same venue’s Half Moon Theatre.

After that, they aim to produce a new play by the American writer Will Eno, a New Yorker who is a fan of their work and has been called ‘a Samuel Beckett for the new generation’. The play, Title and Deed, premiered at Kilkenny Arts Festival — but is still a work in progress. At the heart of Lovett’s style is this ability to revisit and rework a body of plays, refining them each time.

Hegarty Lovett’s direction and preparatory work is less visible, but integral. Where Lovett is able to relax with a casual intensity, inhabiting a part without seeming to try, his partner is more visibly focused and driven. As he reaches middle age, Lovett grows more and more into his roles. “I’m happy to get a few wrinkles,” he says. Hegarty Lovett talks about the allegory and the adventure of Moby Dick — both on stage and in real life — and says that after 15 years on the road, they seem to be doing something right.