1984

Ryan Craig after George Orwell
Theatre Royal Bath
Festival Theatre, Malvern

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Keith Allen (O'Brien) and Mark Quartley (Winston) Credit: Simon Annand
Eleanor Wyld (Julia), Keith Allen (O'Brien), Mark Quartley (Winston) and David Birrell (Parsons) Credit: Simon Annand
Eleanor Wyld (Julia) and Mark Quartley (Winston) watched by Big Brother Credit: Simon Annand
Eleanor Wyld (Julia) and Mark Quartley (Winston) Credit: Simon Annand
David Birrell (Parsons) Credit: Simon Annand

As a camera sweeps across the auditorium, members of the audience point at themselves on screen and wave joyfully as if they were fans picked out at sporting events.

But the cheerfulness does not last as we enter this post-dated version of 1984. Big Brother looks unblinkingly down from a huge, eye-shaped monitor, which by now links surveillance to algorithms that predict even thoughts, in a country where every new version of Newspeak excises vocabulary and with it any idea of free-thinking.

What follows, as eventually the rebellious Winston Smith is humiliated and tortured, is in-your-face, breath-catchingly brutal in director Lindsay Posner’s powerful and disturbing production of Ryan Craig’s adaptation of Orwell’s dystopian 1946 novel.

Posner justly resists any attempt to draw later parallels with particular regimes. We might be in Enver Hoxha’s Albania or present-day North Korea, but the underlying messages are so much wider and speak for themselves. "Lies are truth," declares the enforcer O’Brien. Is 1984 still relevant today? You bet.

When Mark Quartley’s Winston meets the sexually liberated Julia, played by Eleanor Wyld, it is forbidden love as much as forbidden thoughts that turn him from a puppet of the regime, rewriting history and reporting its accidental massacre of a wedding party as a brave successful mission against terrorists disguised as wedding guests, into its sworn enemy.

It is a bit hard to take that he takes an oath to commit every sort of atrocity, including putting sulphuric acid into the eye of a child, if it helps Big Brother’s ousted rival, Goldstein (Trotsky’s real name was Bronstein), except in making a point that one dictator is much like any other.

Quartley, stripped naked at one point, gives a devastating performance. Every electric shock he suffers in the torture chamber, Room 101, seems to surge through the theatre, before, deprived of will, deprived of soul, he is forced to accept "with joy" his guilt for totally fabricated crimes.

Administering these abominations is O’Brien, played by Keith Allen, with the appearance and manner of an affectionate uncle, but a sadist with a heart of Prussic acid. "Break his arm," he quietly tells a guard, as if asking him to bring the prisoner an Ovaltine.

Quartley does all he can to resist, in vain, but fellow accused Parsons, played with passion by David Birrell, pleads his subservience at every turn, inventing a conspiracy theory for planting an unwanted, seditious thought in his brain.

Not every contemporary tweak to Orwell’s story is entirely convincing, a reference for example to gunning down refugees coming by boat seems unnecessarily heavy-handed, but the ideas that he articulated, as in "memory has been nationalised," a human need for delusion or that people need enemies, are as terribly valid in 2024 as in 1946 or in 1984.

Reviewer: Colin Davison

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