Sometimes as he makes his first appearance on stage in Moby Dick, Guy Rhys becomes aware that heads are turning in the front row and that audience members are wondering “Is it real?”
The ‘it’ is Captain Ahab’s peg leg, a legacy of his brush with a mighty whale – the Moby Dick of the title – that, in Herman Melville’s classic story, the vengeful seaman is determined to kill.
The answer is that the leg is real, fashioned from one of Guy’s old prosthetics to resemble Captain Ahab’s whalebone peg leg. The leg previously made an appearance, wrapped in leather, when the actor played a one-legged pirate.
Guy, who was born with a leg deformity that led to amputation when he was eight, doesn’t consider himself a disabled actor and has only shown his prosthetic leg in four shows. “I’d just got this brand new blade and thought I’d show it off. I thought it would make Hercules look cool,” he says.
“The lack of a leg hasn’t been an issue as an actor. I only show the prosthetic when it’s suitable for the show. It’s got to be right. If you’re playing a pirate in Peter Pan, why not use the prosthetic? And obviously if you’re playing Captain Ahab you’ve got to use it.
“One of my prosthetics has been redesigned as a peg leg. It looks great and the noise that my right leg and left peg leg make on the wooden boards has been put into the music. The musical director Jonathan Charles has mimicked the sound I make as Ahab walking and turned it into a sound bite.”
This production of Moby Dick is a very physical one which means the peg leg can become uncomfortable. He makes what he calls pit stops, when he leaves the stage so he can to pull off the prosthetic for a few seconds to stop his leg swelling up. Although he’s used to wearing a prosthetic, it’s uncomfortable enough to make him say, “I wouldn’t spend a day on that peg leg.”
He doesn’t know if the producers were specifically looking for an amputee for the part of Ahab but sees such casting as in the spirit of a show that doesn’t hide anything. There’s no trickery, everything is real. Everything is done on stage, there is no hiding as Ahab and his crew hunt the whale that lost him his leg. Sea shanties are sung live, Ahab’s boat the Pequod is built on stage.
Rhys was already well acquainted with Melville’s story as the 1956 John Huston-directed film version is one of his favourite films. “I’m an amputee so Captain Ahab is a bit of a legend to me,” he says.
“This stage version is like the film – action-packed. The 850 pages of the book are down to 63 pages in this version by Sebastian Armesto. This has really interesting spectacle and is really quite punchy.”
Moby Dick marks Guy’s first visit to York Theatre Royal in a career taking roles in everything from Macbeth to Grimm Tales, from Much Ado About Nothing to Mother Courage. Yet acting wasn’t always a goal. He was washing dishes for a living when theatre first entered his life and he “needed something to do on a Monday night”.
That turned out to be a theatre group that more or less took over his life. “I ended up going to Russia and meeting Peter Brook,” he says, referring to the great director.
Then Guy decided to go to drama school but lacked the necessary finance and ended up managing a Blockbuster Video shop.
“I watched films, read plays, went in art galleries and finally applied to the Drama Centre in 1997. They offered me a place on the spot and I got three scholarships. The past has been a rollercoaster ride which is like every theatre career.”
Written by Steve Pratt
Moby Dick is at York Theatre Royal June 06-08.
Box office 01904 623568 | yorktheatreroyal.co.uk
