Lano & Woodley return to the Canberra Theatre Centre with their take on Moby Dick

It's hailed as one of the great American novels and while you may know the famous first line, do you know the name of the whaling ship's captain? (For the record, it's Ahab).

In a way, it's this combination of notoriety and the unknown that makes it the perfect topic for a comedy show - a Lano & Woodley comedy show, to be exact.

The Melbourne comic duo - aka Colin Lane and Frank Woodley - are headed to Canberra in June with their latest show (and second since reuniting for Fly in 2018). And its title? You guessed it - it's Moby Dick.

Now, there are no promises about how accurate this version of Herman Melville's 1951 book is. As Lane says, "If you're studying Moby Dick at school or university, it's not going to give you any more insights into the story."

But if you weren't expecting that already when you walk into the theatre, you will certainly get with the program as soon as Woodley responds to Lane's recital of the famous line "Call me Ishmael" with "Is that the first line, is it?".

"Some people might think that the show should have been called Moby Dickheads," Lane says.

"But Moby Dick just gives you such a great scope to do a comedy show around, really. You've got the whale, you've got Captain Ahab, you've got his pegleg, you've got the beard, you've got Gregory Peck [from the 1956 film], you've got the ship, the crew. It's got all the tropes of ships and crew and pirates and the sea and the vast oceans. It just gives you a great premise to write a comedy show around.

"The thing about Moby Dick is that it's part of popular culture, but not everybody knows a lot about it. It's lucky for us because we're doing a very famous story that nobody knows anything about so we can do whatever we want."

But how does one - or in this case, two legends of comedy - decide to write a comedy show on Moby Dick?

It's not the most comedic book. At some 700 pages long, the famous story about a sea captain and his arch-nemesis, a whale named Moby Dick, is not exactly packed full of laughs.

In fact, when Woodley first sat down to read the book for the first time - after already deciding with Lane that it would be the topic of their new show - he distinctly remembers questioning what they had got themselves into.

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"I think it's in the second chapter, there's a comical scene where he stays at an inn and out of necessity he has to share the bed with this massive Polynesian warrior who's ... got this head hunter intimidation about him," Woodley says.

"He's a very intimidating character, but then he ends up being lovely, and they share the bed and they get cold, and they even cuddle up.

"And I was like, 'Oh, this is going to be great. I had no idea that it had all these comic elements'. But that's the last laugh in the book. From there, that particular genre is never seen again for the next 694 pages or whatever."

Instead, Woodley found a winding tale full of tangents that didn't really drive the narrative forward or even build on the characters.

And while Lane had read the book as part of his bid to pass time in the 2020 lockdown, Woodley admits he probably wouldn't have finished it if it wasn't for their comedy show - "Is that bad that I'm saying that from a promotional point of view?" he says.

However, what the book lacks in succinct storytelling and comedic plot points, it makes up for in its ability to be adapted into comedy gold.

But while the book may have been the duo's comedic playground, having free rein can pose its own problems.

"You can talk about something for about five days trying to work something out," Lane says.

"In the story, Queequeg, the Polynesian warrior, through some kind of spiritual awakening or spiritual force, thinks that he's going to die. He gets the carpenter on the ship to build him a coffin, and when the ship sinks at the end of the story, Ishmael is the only survivor and he survives by holding on to the coffin before he gets picked up by a passing ship.

"But you talk about that for a week and then you just go, I don't think we can do anything with the coffin, and you just have to move on.

"At the same time, the whole element of the fact that the white whale is Ahab's nemesis - it doesn't take a brainiac to realise that Frank is my nemesis. Frank is my white whale."

Moby Dick is at Canberra Theatre Centre from June 9 to 10. Tickets from $64.90 from canberratheatrecentre.com.au.

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