Moby Dick Rehearsed: Orson Welles's Most Daring Adaptation

This article is dedicated to the centennial of Orson Welles’s birth in 1915 and thirtieth anniversary of his death in 1985. After 1950, Orson Welles was taking longer breaks between his theatre projects since he became more interested in making films. During his long exile in Europe, from 1950 and 1955, Welles performed in eight films, two of which he directed. One of the reasons he was reluctant to work in the theatre was that most of his later productions failed to gain public and/or critical acceptance, which made him dissatisfied and uninterested to work in the theatre. However, he found a chance to stage another theatre production in the beginning of 1955 when he was offered to direct an adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Welles considered Melville's novel one of the greatest American classics, therefore he immediately accepted the offer and with a previous adaptation in hand (a radio play from 1947 and an oratorio), he went even further in deconstructing one of the most popular American novels. Welles's adaptation, entitled Moby Dick Rehearsed, became a play within a play, about a group of actors involved in a run-through rehearsal of a Moby Dick dramatization. The rehearsal format of his play not only gave a ground for an experimentation he longed for, but also allowed for relatively low production costs, which allowed him to find producers easily. The play was staged without elaborate scenery and costumes at the Duke of York's Theatre in London at the beginning of June 1955 for a three and a half weeks run. Moby Dick Rehearsed was surely Welles’s most successful theatre work since Julius Caesar (1938) and beyond the work of the Mercury Theatre, even though it did not get as much publicity. In spite of the fact that Welles himself considered Moby Dick Rehearsed the best thing he did in any form, very soon he abandoned theatre completely in 1960, after two other theatre productions with similar reception (Chimes at Midnight and Rhinoceros).