YORK company Theatre Mill take to the seas this week to stage Yorkshire playwrights John Godber and Nick Lane's adaptation of Herman Melville's maritime tale Moby Dick at the York Guildhall.

Launched last night, Gareth Tudor Price's production will run until November 3 in the setting of The Arctic Whalers Inn and promises to be "an epic in every sense of the word".

"The voyage begins in a local fishing inn, an in-the-round interactive theatre set where a group of old fisherman meet," says producer Rebecca Stafford, introducing Theatre Mill's staging of their first show since Agatha Christie's Witness For The Prosecution in Summer 2015. "Combining spectacular live music and songs of the sea, under the musical direction of Joshua Goodman, our Moby Dick is a bold, exhilarating sea-faring adventure like no other.

"Prophecy speaks of a great whale ship and its quest for glory. Braving storms and tempest tides, the crew pursue a creature as vast, dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself; a white whale of mammoth size and will. With a demonically driven sea captain at the helm, an adrenaline-fuelled chase across the oceans awaits all who volunteer to come aboard."

Godber and Lane's Moby Dick was premiered at the old Hull Truck Theatre at Spring Street, Hull, 14 years ago but Theatre Mill's show is a revised version. "Originally John and Nick wrote it for four actors and two dancers, and now they've re-written it for five actors and two community actors," says Gareth.

"It's an ensemble piece of dynamic storytelling, with the extra character added, so there are now five fictional characters from the Hull trawling community of the Fifties and Sixties, in Hessle Road, who tell the story of Moby Dick, interweaving their own stories into Melville's. Those stories run parallel and will resonate with those of other trawling families in Hull.

York Press:

David Barrass in Theatre Mill's Moby Dick

"For example, there's Ahab's great obsession with the whale and that's mirrored by Joan, whose husband Gordon was lost at sea from a trawler, and she's now always down by the dock in working gear. The sea brings out a madness in both of them."

Martin Barrass, Sarah Parks, Dicken Ashworth and Amy Thompson featured in the Hull cast and now Martin's brother, David, is leading the York company as trawler-man Maurice and Ahab. Fiona Wass is playing Joan and Ishmael and further roles go to Zach Lee, Fidel Nanton, Michelle Long and community players Richard Thirlwell and Bill Laverick.

"Having the fifth character enables the ensemble to have a greater number of actors to divide the parts between and it helps to expand the play too," says Gareth, who faces the challenge of creating the seas without water.

"When I was at Hull Truck, I did the play Every Time It Rains in 2009, and I have plenty of experience of creating and directing theatre where you have to trigger the audience's imagination, just as we did for Bouncers, Up'n'Under and Macbeth. Rather than having water on stage, it comes down to using the imagination...and using pyrotechnics too."

Gareth and the company have put the production together in three weeks, a process helped by plenty of the cast having worked together and with Tudor Price previously. "It very much feels like coming back to the fold, so you can pick up where you left off with familiar faces but also enjoy working with some new people, so it feels new yet familiar too, " says Fiona.

David Barrass is a son of Hull and consequently the play has particular resonance for him. "On a broader scale, it reflects on a passing of an age and an industry: the demise of the first fishing port in the UK, which Hull was, until the Cod Wars with Iceland in the Seventies. Our characters in the play are the ghosts of Hull's trawling past of the Fifties and Sixties."

Theatre Mill present Moby Dick at York Guildhall until November 3. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk