1984 by George Orwell is both a prophecy and a warning about totalitarianism, what it looks like and, through the main character, what it feels like when there is no freedom either to act or think and when the leader of The Party, Big Brother, decides what are facts and what is true.
The power of the story is that every generation over the last 75 years has found something to relate about their own modern state. Totalitarian regimes are obviously not a thing of the past and the worry today is the bending the truth: alternate facts and claims of fake news.
1984 is a treatise in support of democracy and freedom of thought and action, as well as a paranoid gothic story about the violence of men and the scraping clean and rewriting of history.
So how well has it been adapted to the stage, in this case by Ryan Craig and directed by Lindsay Posner?
The novel’s plot is simple – three main characters colliding, but this adaptation is simpler still. One day the deeply dissatisfied member and bureaucrat at Oceania’s Ministry of Truth, Winson Smith (Mark Quartley) meets Julia (Eleanor Wyld) who on the surface is a fanatical Party member. She secretly loathes the regime and they begin a love affair and conspire together to create a world together away from the relentless surveillance of the telescreens and thought police.
They meet the mysterious O’Brien (Keith Allen), an Inner Party member who poses as a member of the rebel group, The Brotherhood, to catch Winston, who in keeping an illicit diary commits ‘thoughtcrime’. O’Brien is a spy intending to deceive, trap, and capture both Winston and Julia.
In this adaptation all the elements are here but not necessarily in the right order – other characters are merged, events of the original story are tweaked, dialogue is differently attributed, all presumably to allow the tale to be told.
And well told it is too by a talented cast with excellent performances in a believable doomed romance by Quartley and Wyld, observed by a masterfully creepy, yet charming, Allen. It’s a nice touch to have Allen and the rest of the ensemble observe Winston and Julia throughout the first half from the sidelines to add to the claustrophobic ubiquitous surveillance of their trysts and plotting.
Indeed the huge telescreen (which observes the audience before the performance and the interval) and the wider staging designed by Justin Nardella (Set, Costume and Video), Paul Pyant (Lighting) and Giles Thomas (Sound) is used to affect us all with the terror of what is unfolding before us.
It’s in the second half in the Ministry of Love when it becomes really visceral, as Winston’s brain and body is stripped through torture (re-education) by O’Brien to within in an inch of his life in accepting the Party’s ‘reality’. His bloody saliva is particularly gruesome. David Birrell’s study as Parsons, Winston’s neighbour and subsequent cellmate whose bewilderment at his fall at the hands of his ‘spy’ daughter from an unquestioning adherent of the Party line to a man willing to do anything to atone, is particularly affecting.
While I didn’t feel the oppression of an endless present in which the party is always right, what came across clearly was the cult of personality of Big Brother and as Orwell once wrote, the descension “into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so”.
Time again in the last 75 years and especially in this year, we have seen and heard the power of hate, the ecstasy of fear and the language of retribution and as such this is a timely, terrifying and well delivered piece of theatre which seems, once again, almost more fact than fiction.
1984 runs until Saturday 23 November. Tickets are available via everymanplayhouse.com/whats-on/1984
Jonathan Caswell
