Casey Jay Andrews on Wild Unfeeling World: 'I really enjoy the informality of trying to get everyone on side'
A darkly comic, contemporary spin on Moby-Dick that swaps the great white whale for a guilt-ridden Londoner
‘This is an incredibly unreliable retelling of Moby-Dick,’ explains writer and storyteller Casey Jay Andrews. Winner of the Best Theatre Weekly Award at its first Adelaide Fringe run in 2020, Andrews’ take on the fabled classic asks audiences to reserve judgement and listen to the whale’s side of the story.
Set in contemporary London, Herman Melville’s antagonistic whale is replaced by Dylan, a woman enduring the worst morning of her life. ‘Dylan is consumed by feelings that she’s responsible for how awful her last week, month, year has been. She feels guilty, she’s begun to blame herself, and she wants to escape that,’ says Andrews of her protagonist. ‘So often in society, but particularly as women, there’s so many situations where even the slightest mistake means you view yourself as monstrous and awful and unforgivable,’ she continues, ‘I really enjoy the informality of trying to get everyone on side and feel sorry for this woman who frankly is just a bit of a mess at the point that we meet her.’
Andrews believes Melville’s poetic outlook means this story is worth retelling in 2026. ‘The quote that I love most from Moby-Dick is: “If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would surely make them speak like great whales.” I think that’s why it’s so beautiful to zoom in on this one person’s little crisis… that one individual story is, for that person, the biggest thing in the world.’
Wild Unfeeling World, The Courtyard Of Curiosities (Migration Museum), 3–8, 10, 12–14 March, 6.30pm.