STAGE REVIEW : ‘Shipwreck’: Art Buoys Tale of the Sea

Julian Barnes’ “Shipwreck” is an inspired piece of writing, a meditation really, that begins with the description of a disaster at sea and ends with the unusually grave conclusion that art--one of the few things that offers catastrophe the coda of redemption--is itself perishable, not a rescue at all but a lucky, temporary reprieve.

Barnes is a British author of striking imagination and verbal felicity, and director Edward Parone’s adaptation shows us how “Shipwreck” (which appeared in the New Yorker magazine last year) is a natural for the stage. In this case it’s the gallery at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where David Dukes reads the account of the ill-fated frigate that hit a reef en route from France to Senegal in June of 1816 and sank.

Nobody remembers the incident, or the political scandal that subsequently rocked the French government. But anyone even casually familiar with the world of art has to retain in the mind’s eye the tortured, self-contradictory, stunning image of spent and hopeful humanity twisting through Theodore Gericault’s painting “The Raft of the Medusa,” unveiled in 1817. “Shipwreck” first describes with Dickensian richness the events surrounding the accident, which include the mutinous barbarism, cannibalism and limp desperation of the survivors before their rescue. Then it focuses on the painting, its history and composition, what Gericault wanted to do and how he did it, and what he didn’t want to do (based on motives both compositional and political). Then it notes public reaction to the painting, which varied with one’s nose for political danger.

In other words, “Shipwreck” pores over the same subject several times through different lenses, through different layers and points of perspective, to tell us that the truth of an event, what was done, how it was--in modern parlance--spun, can’t even be entrusted to the commemorative image that has hurled it through time as an unforgettable metaphor of human misery. It has become something else.

“It is because the figures are sturdy enough to transmit such power that the canvas unlooses in us deeper, submarinous emotions,” says Barnes. Emotions that “can shift us through currents of hope and despair, elation, panic and resignation.”

“Shipwreck” is written with great sensual immediacy--and some very dry wit as well--a saga of characteristically modern inconclusiveness and touching beauty.

Only art can enlarge and explain, Barnes tells us. But in the end Gericault himself scoffed at the painting and natural decay overtakes it. Is this what must become of catastrophe’s hope for meaning?

David Dukes’ thin and faltering reading of the hourlong “Shipwreck” would have benefited from memorization, but Dukes is miked and lashed to a lectern like a dry docent whose notes aren’t quite in order (his occasional mispronunciations and slippery speech rhythms make it appear as though he’s read the piece for the first time on the way to the theater).

Parone has also allowed too many preliminary slide studies to distract us from the text. It’s to his credit that he found in “Shipwreck” a literary work that can play. But in the mouth and manner of a Patrick Stewart or an Edward Woodward--someone who can get his lift from the swirl of language--this is a work that could sing.

This is the first in a series of cooperative events between the Getty and the Mark Taper Forum.

“Shipwreck,” J. Paul Getty Museum Auditorium, 17895 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. Sunday, Wednesday, 8 p.m. Ends Wednesday. $10; (213) 972-7392). Running time: 1 hour.