Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has long been considered an epic of literature – a massive tome of a book that chronicles the odyssey of the Pequod, as they’re led by their obsessive Captain Ahab seeking revenge on the sperm whale that bit his leg off – the titular Moby Dick. Often considered one of the Great American Novels, the novel has been countlessly referenced across time, from its plot to its now legendary opening line. But due to its sheer length and esoteric, often epistemological quest for meaning, it winds up as an incredibly difficult work to adapt.

Now though, get ready as Plexus Polaire shows how it’s done, as the French-Norwegian theatre company arrive in Singapore this week to present their critically-acclaimed adaptation of Moby Dick to open the 2024 Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA). What might surprise you is how they’ve decided on a rather unusual medium to present it in – puppetry. Drawing inspiration from her own family’s seafaring heritage, director Yngvild Aspeli take the opportunity to craft a spectacular visual world on stage, with just seven actors manipulating fifty intricately crafted puppets, alongside live music and immersive video projections, to immerse you into a sensory feast of a world and bring to life the tale of Man vs Nature.

Speaking to performer Viktor Lukawski, who plays the troubled Captain Ahab leading the crew, we found out more about the production prior to its premiere, the significance of Moby Dick today, and his own voyage with puppets. “Most of my work in the puppetry world occured due to happenstance,” says Viktor, on how he came into the puppetry world. “I met Yngvild around 2015, and we connected during a reunion of former L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq students, where everyone who’s been there feel like part of a family. It was strange, but we always ended up never being able to see each other’s work due to clashes in timing, as much as we’d always wanted to work together for future projects, at least until Plexus Polaire did a show called Ashes, and I was given the opportunity to take over one of the actors who was leaving.”

But even before that, Viktor had already been heavily involved in puppet theatre, having worked with Canada’s legendary Old Trout Puppet Theatre prior. “After graduating, I was still in France for a while working in a restaurant, and really felt the need to reinvigorate my creative juices,” says Viktor. “It so happened that the Old Trout Puppet Theatre was performing in France at the time, with Famous Puppet Death Scenes. I was blown away by what puppetry was capable of with the right storytelling techniques, and after the show, I spotted one of the performers outside and we talked for about two hours. He took an interest in my training, and six months later, I ended up in a production they did in Toronto, put a puppet in my hands and it was a trial by fire.”

“As it turns out, I guess I fell into it, and I couldn’t have asked for a better entry point into the world of puppetry, which also brings together my interest in mask performance and physical threatre,” he adds. “It really trains you to manipulate things that seem as simple as the idea of ‘breath’. Now, I’ve been working with Plexus Polaire exclusively since 2017, and their work is quite different from Old Trout’s comedic absurdity and existentialism, coming from a very different cultural origin and perspective.”

Thus far, Viktor has worked on four separate productions with Plexus Polaire, including two that he oversaw the creative process from start to end, including Moby Dick, which Viktor is more than happy to talk about. “Yngvild’s grandfather was a sailor and fisherman, and much like her other work, she’s also infusing parts of her own history and culture into Moby Dick. She treats the stage like a film set, almost engaged in this constant process of editing and figuring out how to drive the central narrative through cuts, zooms and intersperse it with projections as well,” says Viktor. “There’s an underlying darkness to her work too that works very well with her brand of puppetry, and so much of it deals with creating segments of light that leave the puppeteer invisible in the dark so as to fully show off the set design and puppets, allowing us to fully enter the mind and psyche of a character, as if everything else disappears.”

“For Moby Dick, it also rings true to how she’s always been interested in classics that have stood the test of time, and in adapting this 700 page tome, she knows she’s not here to do a word for word presentation, but a way to guide audiences through the story in terms of its psychology, of the mad Captain Ahab at the centre of it all, and what makes him tick,” he adds. “This is further expressed through her puppetry style – so many of them are life-sized, hyperreal and give rise to the idea of the uncanny valley, where we’re no longer sure who’s the puppet and who’s the person, making you forget that they’re objects because they’re so expressive and human-like onstage.”

For Viktor, as much as the production itself is complete, there are always tweaks and changes to be made with each production, every production a slightly different version, but always exciting. “The text we’ve extracted from the novel are all key parts that drive the story we want to portray – Yngvild always has the last say of course, and while she already knows this very specific idea of what she wants to exist onstage, sometimes we wind up removing text from certain scenes altogether, and repurposing and shifting it to a different scene to affect the physicality and energy of that particular scene,” says Viktor. “It’s almost like there’s a text bank for each character, where every actor has all these words at the back of their head, and pulling them out when we’re improvising during the workshopping process. That’s what I mean when I say it feels like a film – where Yngvild has all the film ‘footage’ and putting it onstage is the editing process, and shaping the version we’re presenting to the audience.”

“It’s a lot of fun exploring the text, and we saw so much of Melville’s inspiration for Ahab’s character – King Lear for example, or more introspective moments, and figuring out how to express these in our performance,” he adds. “When we really started officially developing the show, that was also when the pandemic started in Norway, and we suddenly felt completely isolated, much like how the crew aboard the Pequod must have felt adrift at sea, which also informed our version of the show. There were so many starts and stops, and it really felt like we were constantly working and developing it even a hundred performances later. We do still introduce small tweaks here and there, and the dynamic always feels fresh with the different teams and cast we have while on tour, constantly finding our new chemistry.

“I think about how Peter Brook once said that we should approach every day in the theatre as if we had lost everything we found the day before. No matter how great the discoveries are yesterday, they just might not work the day after. Theatre is a living thing, not like a film where you finish the product and press play, and there will always be a need to tweak it. It might even depend on the country we’re playing in, where our main language might have Ishmael the narrator speaking in Spanish or French instead, and we do have an international team who learns the text in their respective language.”

For Viktor, how then does he prepare specifically for the role of Ahab? “I always start by thinking about my own perspective, from the voices to the physicality, and how I project it onto the puppet. Looking at how the puppet appears, I think about the kind of energy and voice it evokes, and how if I had to play Ahab myself without a puppet, would I be playing it the same way?” he says. “Something about puppetry brings out a different side to you, and I reached in and unlocked something I’d never experienced before in my voice when I explored the possibilities, and when the puppet itself came out of the woodwork beyond its rudimentary form, that’s when it really started to inspire the vocals. There was also a lot of exploration and experimentation where we would take turns playing each other’s characters, and there was something about observing how other people would interpret the character that would allow me to find other layers and nuances as well.”

“A lot of Ahab is also informed by the music we have, which is scored and performed by long-time collaborators of Yngvild, and there are both melodious vocals and this intense Norwegian death metal sound as well. I’m astounded by the complexities of these voices, with this incredible freedom to go from guttural deep voices that resonate throughout the layers and atmosphere of the room, to beautiful angelic tones,” he continues. “The music crescendoes and decrescendos along with the story’s trajectory, and you feel immersed in Ahab’s mind, and his overwhelming, maddening obsession where he sees himself as a god.”

Puppetry then is what allows Viktor to access a completely different side that he may never have as a live actor, and activate the power of imagination and possibility. “It gives you a lot more courage to explore, and I’m more willing to push into this element of madness. I know I don’t look like a 60-year old man, and what puppetry does is to play these characters you never imagined for yourself, and tap into parts you never knew were possible,” says Viktor. “There’s even this version of Ahab that’s three metres tall, and Moby Dick himself that spans almost the entire stage because we’re playing with zooms and close ups, where we could almost see the inside of Ahab’s brain and all the details of his expressions and features. It’s so much we’re playing with here and experimenting with.”

That’s already a whopping setpiece for any theatre production, and the idea of bringing that from country to country already sounds like a logistical nightmare. “We have over 50 puppets that travel with us, with no spares, all travelling by ship over sea across maybe 15 or 16 cases. Beyond that, we also have the technical team’s equipment, from the projector to set pieces, and it’s really a monster of an operation,” says Viktor. “Some things, like the giant whale carcass, are separated into manageable pieces to put into boxes, and some of them do get damaged from the constant movement both when transported and stress from being used to perform onstage. We have to check up on them before every show, and if we don’t have a repairman on standby, we have to make do with tools like hot glue to keep us going as long as we can until the designers and constructors can come in for a full day of repairs and touch ups.”

“At the same time, these puppets aren’t entirely fragile things – they were designed to be able to tour, and can withstand some degree of wear and tear over time,” says Viktor. “Other issues that emerge come with how we have to adapt to every stage and venue we play at, where sometimes there’s not enough space backstage, so we always have to be prepared to adjust things and go with different set-ups and acoustics, and testing it during our tech runs to make sure we know of any new cues or ways to make the space work for us during each iteration. But you do get used to the rhythm of the preparation after touring it to so many places!”

With the theme of They Declare this year for SIFA, Viktor also comments on whose voices feel more important than ever to be heard, amidst the cacophony of noise we’re so often inundated with on a daily basis. “To me, there’s this huge discussion happening all over the world regarding marginalised communities, minorities and people who haven’t had the opportunity to voice their opinions or feelings, and I think working in puppetry, I’ve been exposed to a lot more of such communities and realising how important their voices are,” says Viktor. “Right now there’s still so many Eurocentric points of view, when there are so many other perspectives and layers we’ve been ignoring for so long. If anything, we need to listen to the voices of the youth, the people who are inheriting this world, because they do know what they’re talking about as they plan for this terrifying future, both in terms of the environment and politics. I want these voices to be heard by adults, and in turn to inspire us as adults and what we can do in our work to make change that’s necessary.”

“These days, I do think that in North America at least, series like Sesame Street have definitely caused puppetry to be perceived as children’s theatre, but long before that, puppetry has had a social history of being a conduit of satire and elements of change, allowing anyone to tell stories from different places and speak truth about sociopolitical issues,” says Viktor, on the place of puppetry today. “It’s similar to animation I guess, where the speed and colours of animation help engage the imagination in young minds, but we’re actively pushing the idea that it is not just for children, showing off its universal appeal and universal storytelling ability. Take War Horse for instance, that found success in both children and adults, and these are shows which audiences of different ages will resonate with for different reasons, with the more mature messages going over children’s heads.”

Finally, Viktor ends off by commenting on the value of Moby Dick today, and how he hopes the audience here responds to puppetry on the big stage. “Some people have the misconception that old stories are outdated and have nothing relevant to say about the world today, but it is these stories precisely that stand the test of time with their universal elements,” says Viktor. “Moby Dick is about the concept of obsession, and about mankind’s war on nature, with our want to control certain things but realising how nature always wins out anyway. We as humans become obsessed with this idea of control, looking for answers and solutions even if they hurt the environment, and for Ahab, he’s so desperate, blinding him from the realities of the world around him, even pulling his crew into this world of danger, and becoming this megalomaniac hell-bent on revenge.”

“All these are part of our world, these stories that trace as far back as Greek mythology that persist even today, and I suppose, what we really want audiences to realise is the relevance of these tales as old as time,” he continues. “We might not have the experience of being out on a ship in middle of the ocean, but we might relate to the idea of isolation and seclusion, whether we’re in danger of falling into our own patterns and obsessions, and it really does become a commentary on human nature, brought to life through our performance, through the music, and through the audience’s participation in having their imagination evoked by the show they see in front of them.”

“And of course, I do hope audiences realise how puppetry is powerful in how it is able to address and talk about very deep and often difficult topics, and to remind adults of the importance of child-like wonder, and to remind them of the magic and beauty of imagination, and how important it is to play,” he concludes. “Puppetry often unveils deep set emotions within the audience – sometimes you do see people moved to tears with how powerful it can be. It’s absurd – it’s just an object being manipulated to move, but there’s a growing hunger for such interactions and impacts, and realisation of the power of puppetry, and it still amazed me with each tour stop and workshops we do how something so seemingly simple can appeal to such a wide audience and have such a huge impact on them.”

Moby Dick plays from 17th to 18th May 2024 at the Singtel Waterfront Theatre, as part of Singapore International Festival of Arts 2024. Tickets available here

SIFA 2024: They Declare runs from 17th May to 2nd June 2024 across various venues. Tickets and full programme available here