1984

The title is legend, iconic, few people in the English speaking world will be unaware of George Orwell’s novel written back in 1949 predicting a chilling dystopian future.  Generations will have read it as a school curriculum essential and some of us will have seen the film. And given all this one might enter the theatre thinking that this is a familiar beast, and perhaps one that would struggle to be transferred to the stage and offer few surprises.

Think again! Ryan Craig’s adaptation is masterful and Lindsay Posner’s direction is startlingly spare, bleak even. Put these two, together with designer Justin Nardella and lighting designer Paul Pyant, and add a haunting and startling soundscape by Giles Thomas, and you have a work of theatrical magic. And all this before mentioning a single member of the cast.

Creating Orwell’s brutal vision on stage and the many locations required is deftly handled with the use of video imagery. The terrifying interiors shift, live video feeds, some of which scarily face the audience before the play starts, are used sparingly and to great effect. Limiting those moments increases the impact for certain. And video elements, using actors not present, is so seamlessly inserted into the action that one feels that maybe they are there, lurking backstage and watching Big Brother-like.

Central to the whole is Winston Smith here played by Mark Quarterly. Smith is not an easy character to portray, is he heroic or is he ordinary? Here he is compliant, taking the party line and only gradually rebelling. Quarterly is gentle, there is an effective ordinariness to his portrayal, Smith is everyman, taking the easy route until he is led from the party path by Julia. Eleanor Wyld is the tough, hard-line party champion, so when she reveals her true colours the impact is far more affecting. Her performance balances that hard edge with that of temptress and seductress with real skill.

David Birrell takes the role of Parsons, the cowering neighbour, terrified and quaking and gradually descending into crazed despair when his daughter Lily accuses him of a hideous range of misdemeanours, none of which are true. Birrell is simply marvellous, descending from quivering wreck to demented and despairing victim with such chilling force.

Keith Allen is cast as O’Brien, the ever watchful and deceitful arm and eyes of the party. It could be played hard and tough, and Allen could no doubt do that. But instead his O’Brien is reserved, quiet and rational. He is a force of reason and it is only in the last moments of this work of theatre that the true depths of evil and oppression are shown, until those moments he is smilingly insidious, ingratiatingly sympathetic and doubly sinister. Allen as an actor is a force to be reckoned with and here, in this tightly contained performance, we get to see his real talents and power.

Seldom do you experience an audience so silently transfixed by a piece of theatre, and at the end as the lights fade to darkness we took time to breathe before applauding.

There are so many poignant moments in this marvellous production, lines that 50 years on from Orwell’s predicted doomed world, ring far too true. Fight for a ticket!

Andrew Kay

30 October

Theatre Royal Brighton

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