Moby Dick—Rehearsed

The setting is a mid-19th-century American repertory theater. The play begins subtly as the audience arrives with the cast milling around an empty stage. The cast members generally fool around and complain about their boss and their forthcoming production of King Lear. Then, making a big dramatic entrance and smoking a cigar, the actor manager of the time comes on stage and tells them they are going to rehearse a version of Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby Dick that he has been adapting for the stage.

The cast grudgingly performs the play, improvising scenery from items lying around, and gradually get more into character as the play develops.

Orson Welles filmed approximately 75 minutes of the original 1955 production, with the original cast, at the Hackney Empire and Scala Theatres in London. He hoped to sell the film to Omnibus, the United States television series which had presented his live performance of King Lear in 1953; but Welles stopped shooting when he was disappointed in the results.[1] The film is lost, with the only copy believed to have been destroyed when a fire broke out at Welles's Madrid home in 1970, while he rented it to the actor Robert Shaw, who was drunkenly smoking in bed.

Because the film is lost, many people have speculated it was never created. However, evidence supporting the film having been made can be found in the book, The Films of Christopher Lee, by Pohle Jr. and Hart – Patrick McGoohan said in a 1986 interview that the excerpt of the film he saw while Welles was reviewing the rushes one day was fantastic.[5]

In The Fabulous Orson Welles, by Peter Noble, cameraman Hilton Craig reveals: "it was by no means merely a photographed stage-play. On the contrary, it was shot largely in close-ups and looked very impressive on near-completion."

Kenneth Williams' autobiography Just Williams records Williams' apprehension at the project, as it was filmed by the play's cast in just one weekend at the then-abandoned Hackney Empire theatre. He describes how Welles' dim, atmospheric stage lighting made some of the footage so dark as to be unwatchable. At least 40 minutes of the play was filmed, but is now presumed lost.

Of the film project, Welles's official biographer Barbara Leaming wrote in 1985:

Persistent rumours over the years have hinted that there is a finished film of Welles's Moby Dick—Rehearsed stashed away somewhere, but Orson had barely started the film when he gave it up. "We shot for three days", he recalls, "and it was obvious it wasn't going to be any good, so we stopped. There was no film made at all. We only did one and a half scenes. I said, let's not go on and waste our money, because it's not going to be any good."[6]

In support of this, Leaming quotes Welles's friend at the time, the playwright Wolf Mankowitz, who said: "Orson's attitude is a very pragmatic one. He thinks until you get on the set with the actors and lights and the rest of it, you don't know whether it's going to work or not. And he simply reserves the right as an artist to sort of drop it if it doesn't work."[6]

It is believed that the Munich Film Museum, which holds many of Welles's unfinished films, is in possession of the reels of the unfinished film; but by the time they had been donated in the 1990s, the reels had deteriorated beyond recovery; nonetheless, the museum is preserving these reels in case future technologies may be able to recover them.[7]

The Moby Dick—Rehearsed film is not to be confused with a later unfinished film project in 1971, wherein Welles filmed 22 minutes of various scenes from the play, playing all the parts himself. The footage of that film was acquired by the Munich Film Museum in 1995 and restored in 1999.

The play was adapted for Australian television in 1965.

• ​Moby Dick​ at the Internet Broadway Database
• Moby Dick Rehearsed at IMDb
• wellesnet: The orson welles web resource
• Kenneth Williams recalls Moby Dick Rehearsed and Orson Welles (1978)