The novel not only tells of "Moby Dick"; it is itself the colossus, whose surface alone is incalculable, in whose innards a reader can lose themselves, whose depths are hardly fathomable. The book from 1851 reaches far in its complexity and wanders over into the treatise, science report, marine research report, and cultural critical essay – and indeed into the post-baroque cabinet of wonder of the human mind and striving. 

"We all see in the rivers and seas the same image: It is the mysterious image of life that we cannot grasp." Or, translated differently, "the world's visage, the emblem of the unfathomable specter of our existence." Is it this that interests Robert Wilson, the American from Texas born in 1941, about the book of his fellow countryman from New York City, which he stages at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus? The unfathomable specter of our existence, in which the power of nature, human obsession, and fate play a dark role?

"The invisible officer of the fate secret service," as it is called by Melville, drives Ismael (Kilian Ponert) together with his comrade, the wild South Sea islander Quiqueg, aboard the whaling ship Pequod, where Captain Ahab, who once lost a leg in combat with the white whale, is intent on revenge and retribution. So much and so horrifically that he gives up everything for it: the ship, the crew, his Christianity, his life, and his soul.

Wilson adds something decisive as well, who flips through the chapters of the book loosely and cuts picturesque miniatures and living silhouettes from them, Melville adds - a dream and dreamer figure: "Cause if I dream it / Maybe it will happen." Therefore, he implants a childish figure (perhaps a grandson of the only one to survive the misfortune, Ismael) into the story, who poses the eternal question of what an I is, how it distinguishes itself from another I, and whether it stands as a stranger to itself. In Düsseldorf, Christopher Nell plays this perpetual boy: as a sprite, a fidgeter, a male soubrette, a commentating cheeky clown, and know-it-all.  

Thunder. The turmoil of the sea. Swelling whale songs. It starts out roaring. The songs are composed by Anna Calvi, performed live by a band under Dom Bouffard: a bit of folk and shanties, primarily rock with a lot of percussion.  

In Wilson's theater, bodies, light, time, and geometry connect, and gesture reigns over verbal expression. He lightens the existential drama of Old Testament weight, builds it lightly and lifts it into the height of insubstantial play: acrobats, light albums, and shadow creatures are and must be his art and stage people. Seaman's yarn transforms under his hand into finely spun silk.

Wilson's white magic, which also utilizes treated historical images and film materials from John Huston and Orson Welles and projects them, is not yet exhausted or has regained its strength. Rosa Enskat in a white cloak with her hair swept to one side by the wind is, as Ahab, a reflection of the whale and his similar antagonist. Not a demon, but a quirky diva expressing her longing only through negation, like from a film by Robert Aldrich ("Hush, Hush, Sweet Ahab") or a Dürrenmatt drama. The grainy gray-white horizon towers with clouds and is populated by birds. Before the sky, the nutshell of a boat; in the sky, the outlines of a brightly lit little house, the replica of the oldest building in Nantucket.

The ballet of figures with spread hands and mask-like painted faces, repeating certain phrases in a Tourette-like manner, shapes the victory over the toil of all movement. Thus, the grace of the limber man and the puppet forms. Death and decay do not have the last word, just like in Mozart's "Don Giovanni." Wilson, the directing master of ceremonies, turns off consciousness in the service of his aesthetic absoluteness.