The company of the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus’s Moby Dick. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

One expects majestic and stark visual poetry from Robert Wilson, the avant-garde interdisciplinary theatermaker and visual artist who passed away last year. And his final work, an adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick—created with Germany’s Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in 2024 and presented at BAM in mixed German and English—certainly delivers that. Directed, designed, and lit by Wilson, it’s a study in darkness and light, black and white, full of crisp horizontal portals that constrain the space. Figures are silhouetted against a video backdrop (by Tomasz Jeziorski) in angular shapes that almost make them resemble Kara Walker collages; bright white pin spots pick out faces and hands of individual performers (usefully, as Julia von Leliwa’s black, white, and gray costumes and Manu Halligan’s make-up design flatten their differences into archetype).

Wilson and dramaturg/adaptor Robert Koall capture the tragic sweep of Melville in brisk, compressed scenes—cross-sections of critical junctures more than narrative. He outlines the overall arc of the novel with not a lot of interest in connecting the dots. (Having spent several years a while back working on a theatrical adaptation of the novel myself, I recognize the irony in a complaint that a Moby Dick-adjacent work didn’t have enough detail about the mechanics of whaling. But I found that I missed the lived-in nautical flavor; those details feel digressive but turn out to be essential. Part of the power in the novel’s climactic conflict between Man and Whale derives from how much we the readers know by then about the men and the work.)

Still, we get most of the high points, anchored by Melville’s most iconic lines and images. We begin with the elderly Ishmael (Raphael Gehrmann), telling a story he’s told a thousand times before, and then drop back to the inn on Nantucket where the tale begins. Ishmael signs on to the whaling ship Pequod for its last doomed voyage, and then the piece proceeds from its departure through its time at sea, the increasingly monomaniacal madness of Captain Ahab (Rosa Enskat) in his pursuit of the white whale that took his leg, the attempts of mate Starbuck (Heiko Raulin) to shift Ahab from his doomed course, and finally the destruction of the ship by the whale, with Ishmael the lone survivor: “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

The script is the structure on which the piece hangs rather than a fully fleshed out piece of writing, and much of the action and emotion take place in Anna Calvi’s songs. The musical vocabulary is sweepingly capacious, here twining the rhythm of a sea chantey into a drinking song that could have come from many a musical, there building to a giant rock-concert crescendo, and throwing in a plaintive, tuneful number for Ishmael with the refrain of “If I dream it, maybe it will happen”—an oddly wistful piece of optimism for a man who’s gone to sea from a lack of desire to do much of anything else.

The visuals, too, capture scope, simultaneously lavish in scale and restrained in form: there’s a Shaker simplicity to the giant house/inn that flies in and out, a simple geometry to the platforms and beams that make up the ship. Jeziorski’s video, filling the huge upstage wall of the opera house, includes both a whale at what must be roughly life size and some human faces blown up to equal enormity, as well as cloudscapes, ship rigging, and other permutations of light and sky.

Raphael Gehrmann in the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus’s Moby Dick. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The abstraction in the textual construction and performance style is also pure Wilson (with perhaps a dose of German expressionism): Scenes that perseverate on a sequence of a few lines, repeating and escalating into an intense spiral. (I was reminded of the whirlpool into which the Pequod ultimately disappears, but as I said, I’ve spent more time than most with Moby Dick.) Repetitive movements with limbs posed stiffly so that the performers sometimes resemble jointed puppets. Kabuki-like stark white faces, never revealing emotion—though we feel the waves of intensity emanating from Rosa Enskat’s Ahab). Tobin Kärst’s sound design makes the tap-tap-tapping of Ahab’s wooden leg omnipresent; we don’t always see Ahab, but we always know to fear his imminent arrival (a la Peter Pan’s crocodile).

Less expected was the signal addition Wilson and his collaborators have made to the piece: a Boy (Christopher Nell) in gray short pants, part clown or Shakespearean Fool, part commentator, part audience for the story Ishmael is telling (part us, in other words). From the moment he follows Ishmael’s famed “Call me Ishmael” introduction with “Do not call me Ishmael,” he threads a whimsical, commedia dell’arte-tinged counterpoint through the story. He contorts his body to view the scene from different angles, he takes bombastic charge of conducting the orchestra, and he gently mocks Ishmael. I thought for much of the piece that he would turn out to be cabin-boy Pip, who leaps overboard during a whale hunt and is abandoned by the Pequod in their pursuit of the whale, rescued only by chance and never quite sane thereafter—but instead, Pip becomes an emblem for the Boy. He is “untethered” and “wild,” one with the sea in a way the rest of the men are not.

“We’re too wild to die,” the men sing at the end—and yet, except for Ishmael, they do. The “sunlit sea will be glowing unchanged” after they are gone—all of these men who bound themselves to Ahab’s quest. It’s Pip on the sea; the Boy with his capering strangeness; even Ishmael and the Boy with their wistful dreams, who imagine something else. More than Moby Dick, it’s that something else that I take away from Robert Wilson’s final work, that weird flickering thread of resistance to the scripted narrative.