1984

There is little to add to Lesley Reed’s comprehensive review of this powerful touring production.  I must certainly agree that this Australian cast set design, lighting and sound are excellent – all are indications of what can be done when imaginations completely in keeping with the text are adequately resourced.  The design by Chloe Lamford, in particular, makes possible numerous coups de theatre – surprising and frightening appearances and disappearances by Winston Smith’s nemeses and the transformation before our eyes (that makes what we’ve seen till then a dizzying illusion) of a musty library cum government office into the blank, dazzlingly lit Room 101.  Simultaneously, Julia and Winston’s little love nest, supposedly hidden, safe and without surveillance, is revealed as none of these things.  The effect is visceral.

I am not so convinced, however, by the framing device that puts Winston Smith’s story and diary in the past, discussed by others in 2050 or even later.  With due respect to Robert Icke and Duncan MacMillan, whose adaptation of Orwell’s novel itself is excellent, the concept that it all happens in the past distances the audience rather than making the story more relevant to us in our time.  There’s a lot of expositional dialogue to make this interpretation work and it feels abstract.

It springs from a perhaps too literal interpretation of the inclusion of The Principles of Newspeak as an appendix to the novel.  One might equally say that Orwell (because it was Orwell), the novelist, included the appendix as explanation and further warning rather than as some sort of meta-fiction.  In any case, when one stands back from the terror of the totalitarian state that Orwell creates (c.f. Stalin’s Russia in Grossman’s Life & Fate or Julian Barnes recent The Noise of Time in both of which fear is more insidious) I’ve always had a credibility problem with 1984.  Winston Smith is really a very, very minor threat to Big Brother and The Party.  He knows no secrets, so why torture him?  Just shoot him.  But Orwell uses Winston Smith’s fate, skilfully making the reader terrified, as this production makes the audience, as a melodramatic way of demonstrating the lengths to which totalitarian control will go, and warning his audience (in 1949) of the dangers posed by authoritarian regimes – in his mind, the Soviet Union – not just to physical safety, but to language and thought.  Clearly the relevance – today more than ever – is there.

As for the torture of Winston in this production, designed to make him see deny the evidence of his own eyes (i.e. ‘fact’) and, finally, to betray, one needs a strong stomach: the show comes close to ‘torture porn’ in this extended scene – although it is extremely well realised – that’s why it’s so horrible and believable.

Michael Brindley