Moby-Dick is a book much quoted but seldom read. Its infamous tale of obsession, ecocide, and preposterous human ego is a fine tome for our times. It is also so much more besides.

It’s about Ahab’s fanaticism, sure, but it is also: a tale of queer love, which is hinted at here; the desperate and doomed contradictions of capitalism; a depiction of a multicultural workplace of tolerance amid the practicalities of facing ever-likely death; and, perhaps most importantly of all, a very funny work of fiction, in which an entire chapter is dedicated to taking the piss out of catholicism through the medium of whale dick jokes.

Getting across even half of the complexity of this novel in an hour-long storytelling slot is an impossible job, and sensibly Ross Ericson, our lone storyteller, doesn’t even try. Instead, we get an abridged version of the main narrative plot of the Great American Novel. We hear the terrifying power of the whale; we meet Ishmael, our egalitarian narrator; we are introduced to the main characters, with their own superstitions, motives, and insanities. 

Ahab himself looms large in the telling. Ericson’s depiction of the monomaniacal seaman is gentler and more sympathetic than some, perhaps erring towards trying to understand why these disparate but only occasionally desperate men were willing to follow their captain to his leviathan nemesis.

The Rotunda Theatre, a few yards from shore (and also the Brighton i360; another doomed enterprise), is an appropriately atmospheric venue for such a tale. The ropes of the tent creak and groan in the wind, like rigging on a 19th century whaler. Scenes are interrupted, a little jarringly, by loud bursts from Canadian indie hipsters The Decemberist’s Moby-Dick themed back catalogue.

Ericson is clearly coming down with something, and occasionally stumbles over the text. Nevertheless, it’s a monumental and largely convincing undertaking, if slightly conservative in its chosen passages. 

No spoilers here, if it is indeed possible to spoil so old and infamous a tale, but the denouemont is thrillingly and evocatively told, and our throng head out into the light happy not to be feeling Ishmael’s damp, drizzly November of the soul.