3,648 words, 19 minutes read time.
I’ve read Orwell’s classic novel 1984 three times, starting in my late teens or early twenties, and I’m now on my fourth. My first encounter with the story was a showing of the 1954 live television production with Peter Cushing in the lead role when it was repeated sometime in the mid-seventies. I was pleased to rediscover this on a nicely restored DVD last year, and I regard this version as the definite film adaptation of the book, far superior to the version starring Richard Burton and John Hurt which was released, predictably enough, in 1984. The 1950’s American ‘CIA’ adaptation which can be easily found for free online, is best forgotten, though worth a single watch for comedic purposes. I’ve also read and reviewed (link at the end) Sandra Newman’s 2023 novel Julia, a retelling of the story from the point of view of the main female character.
So, I’m well-versed in the events, themes and lore of Orwell’s perhaps definitive tale of dystopia. I regard it as a genuine masterpiece, one of the greatest works of the English literary canon and love how its meaning mutates and adds extra layers of depth with each new visit, as both I, the reader, and the world around me change.
But I’d never seen a theatrical production, so I approached this performance by the Bath Theatre Royal Players with anticipation and with little idea of what to expect. As is usual with my visits to both the theatre and the cinema, I avoided reading any reviews before I’d seen it for myself.
The first thing I noticed as I took my seat, well placed at the end of the third row from where the action would take place, was the huge telescreen mounted at the back of the stage, with cameras silently panning the audience, giving us an immediate sense of being under surveillance. This was suitably disconcerting, and I made sure I wasn’t visible on the screen as I sneaked a pre-performance pinch of snuff.
This screen has a big role in the production, becoming almost an extra cast member/character in its own right. Its functions include text information regarding changes in location, from the Ministry of Truth (‘Minitruth’) to Winston’s flat, to the canteen, to the Golden Country where Winston will begin his secret erotic liaisons with Julia, to the ‘safe-house’ where they will continue after their fateful ‘recruitment’ by the sinister O’Brien and, after the interval, to the Cell and the dreaded Room 101. The screen also blares out triumphant announcements by the Party, praising the achievements of Ingsoc, such as rises in munitions production for use in the war against Eastasia or Eurasia, whichever has currently been designated the enemy of Oceania, the latest victories of ‘our’ glorious troops or latest atrocities by those of the ever-shifting enemy. These announcements are accompanied by a still image of the benevolent, moustached, Stalin-like leader Big Brother himself, an image with which most of us are familiar. During the fabled ‘Two Minute Hate’, the image of Big Brother is replaced by that of Goldstein, the Trotsky of the story, the once revolutionary leader turned ultimate counter-revolutionary, responsible for, through his mysterious underground group The Brotherhood for all manner of acts of sabotage against the loyal people of Airstrip One and the heroic soldiers of Oceania.
We are gripped from the moment Winston Smith appears on a stage that is bare apart from the screen behind him and a bed and chair to his far left, seemingly breaking the Fourth Wall as the cast will do throughout the performance, addressing us directly as he goes about his daily work, reciting his latest amendments to the historical record, consigning events and people to the Memory Hole to fit with the current needs and thinking of Big Brother and the Inner-Party.
The process by which history is amended had been updated, the pen and paper of Orwell’s original digitalised. This makes sense, allowing us to see this process at work directly on the screen as individuals are ‘disappeared’ from history so that no tangible record of their former existence remains. It also forces us to reflect upon how modern technology has made it far easier for the truly totalitarian system Orwell envisaged to become a reality, and perhaps is becoming all too increasingly real. ‘1984’ as a point in time may be forty years in our past, but as a textbook for absolute control it doesn’t seem so far in our future, or even so distant from our present.
Soon he will be joined by his neighbour and ‘friend’, to the extent that friendship can exist in such a world, the cheerful but vulnerable Parsons, who expresses his pride in his seven-year-old daughter’s ability to identify and keenness to report ‘criminals’ to the secret police. Most of us will be all too aware that he himself will soon enough fall victim to this public-spirited ‘keenness’.
We next get to meet Julia for the first time. She is wearing the regulation Party boiler suit but with the red sash of the Anti-Sex-League tied around her waist. Those of us with a decent prior knowledge of the story, of course, knew that Julia would soon be revealed to be rather more pro-sex than was fitting for a member of such an organisation.
It wasn’t long before we met O’Brien. It was then that I realised O’Brien had always been with us, sitting silently on the chair by the bed in the near-darkness, a location to which he would return whenever he was not required front and centre. This was a clever decision, which powerfully underscored the theme of the omnipresence of the Secret/Thought Police.
Now, the full cast was in place, though there are also a handful of silent supporting characters who blare the role between performer and prop assistant, appearing as unnamed minor Party functionaries in the standard issue boiler suits whilst also quickly and efficiently moving the bed and chair from the side of the stage to the centre and back again, a move which assists the on-screen text in denoting changes in location.
The first half, lasting precisely one hour and eight minutes, takes the story through Winston and Julia’s illicit assignations, their fateful meeting with O’Brien who sinisterly tells Winston that ‘We will meet again in the place where there is no darkness,’ the meaning of which will be well known to those familiar with the book, and which is made all too clear to even those who aren’t after the interval, and concludes with their arrest at the Safe House.
For me, the highlight of that first half, and the greatest use of faux-location change was Winston and Julia’s first sexual encounter in the Golden Country. The sudden appearance of vibrant colour, of sun, trees and sky on the screen, plus the sound of birds singing freely and the windy rustle of nature, attacked the senses wonderfully, marking a fabulous contrast, for the first and only time in the play, with the stark, grey drabness of life within the rooms of the Party. I will assign my credits at the end, but this is perhaps the best place to mention the valuable role that both set and video designer Justin Nardella and sound designer Giles Thomas, for what was a very loud play sonically, adding much to the unnerving feel of the whole.
The fifty-minute second half utilises just three locations, The Cell, the notorious Room 101, and the canteen for the short, sad, final meeting between Winston and Julia. It begins with Parsons alone on stage, blooded and almost broken, his despair briefly lessened as he is joined by the familiar face of Winston. Despite everything he must know about the workings of his master’s by this point, he still clings to the hope that they will be lenient with him, ‘maybe five or ten years’ in a labour camp. He also retains his pride in his seven-year-old daughter whose actions have brought him to this point, seeing in them confirmation that he had ‘raised her right’.
Soon, any hope for mercy Parsons retains disappears as he is taken away by the uncredited supporting players/crew, to meet his fate in Room 101, a room with a reputation that has proceeded it.
The rest of the play becomes essentially a two-hander, a one-sided duel, between the characters of O’Brien and Winston I do think, however, that the young girl who stood silently inscrutable, close to the action throughout as a young functionary who had been desensitised through repeated exposure to the brutality that unfolded before her, and our eyes, deserved a credit for her admirable stillness and blankness of expression.
Other ‘none-speaking characters’ also appear at one point to beat Winston with clubs, a naked, completely naked Winson, stripped of all clothes and humanity.
Almost to the end, Winston remains unbroken, in spirit if not in body, desperately fighting to retain something, something to cling onto, a faith that the ‘human spirit’ will, somehow, assert itself over tyranny, and the belief that reality is, in some areas at least, an absolute that exists and must continue to exist, regardless of the power that some human beings have abrogated to themselves to redefine and amend it at will. Two plus two must always equal four, even if the whole world insists this is not necessarily the case.
This is the crux of the story and the question that is left for any serious person who engages with it, that of how can an individual retain belief in any absolutes when those with the power show moment by moment, day by day that they can simply expunge from history anything that contradicts whatever is their latest, expedient version of ‘truth’? The irony is, of course, that Smith, in his job within the Minitruth was himself complicit in this ongoing act of historical amendment, knowing as well as anyone the relevant quotation from the Handbook of Ingsoc: ‘He who controls the past controls the present. He who controls the present controls the future.’
For O’Brien, as a True Believer, it is not enough to simply break Winston, or those like him who dare to think differently, to doubt and to hope. It is not enough that he will submit, through beatings and electric shock treatment, that he will say that he sees five fingers when O’Brien demands it. He must also believe it, must see five fingers, even though we, the audience, know he is holding up only four.
Not only must we imagine a ‘Boot stamping upon a human face, forever,’ but we must also imagine the human underfoot as accepting this as a normality that can never, and should never, be changed.
In this sense, we then, as the audience, through our senses become the arbiters of true reality. But what if there is no audience, if O’Brien, the powerful, and Smith, the powerless were up there on stage alone, or really in a dungeon as far away physically from humanity as it is morally (as we understand it) or what if we too could be made to see four fingers, all of us: in what sense could it remain true that O’Brien was only holding up four?
Ultimately, in the world of 1984, through the constant refinement, amendment and shrinkage of language (which may strike a chord with some members of a 2024 audience) the aim is not only to punish and reform those minds that are guilty of ‘wrongthink’ but to make wrongthink impossible. How can you dream of freedom if the word and the concept of ‘freedom’ no longer exist?
In the end, of course, Winston does break, his suffering as he is tortured with increasing savagery towards this moment of breakage, literally made large to us by the projection of the physical Smith, battered, bruised and wracked by the ever-increasing power of the shocks being fed directly into his brain through electrodes attached to his head, onto the big screen.
I’ve already included too many spoilers for anyone wishing to see the play who is unfamiliar with the source material, but I will leave at least one aspect of the production unspoilt, the original manner which the writer and/or director chose to portray the penultimate, climatic scene in Room101.
The scenes between O’Brien and Smith utilise dialogue which is more or less lifted and adapted straight from Orwell’s original text, which is only right as little can be done to improve on such a master of the English language.
In spirit, the production as a whole is also faithful to the book, though there are one or two omissions worth mentioning. We lose the junk shop where Winston buys his little snow globe, a miraculous relic from past times, and its owner Charrington. It is however alluded to, and that is perfectly fine.
We do, however, also lose Winston’s belief that ‘If there is hope it lies in the proles,’ and I think that’s a pity. It reduces hope to nothing more than an individual endeavour. It may be possible for isolated individuals to hold out to the very end, to go to their grave still quietly secure in their knowledge that two plus two must always equal four even if the exercise of sheer brute power has made them say otherwise. But aside from the intervention of a power from outside of the universe, acting as the guarantor of Absolute Reality, or God, then it’s difficult to see where hope for the defeat of tyranny can be found if it is not to be found in collective action, whether we want to call that collective the ‘proles’ or the ‘masses’, or the ‘people’ or something else.
This is one of my few minor criticisms of the play, along with one plot device involving the printing of a certain photograph from his home telescreen by Winston as a means of retaining a concrete record of a historical event. This isn’t in Orwell’s original novel, written at a time when remote printing from a screen was impossible and perhaps seen as too far-fetched even for Science Fiction. But even if it had been possible, I think Orwell would have seen such an act as something too risky for Winston to attempt for it to be believable.
There was also one reference by Parson to watching newsreel footage of ‘Eastasian women and children in small boots’ being machine-gunned at the coast. This seemed shoe-horned into the script and was also glaringly incongruent in almost telling us what to think about a certain issue, current in our society, that is being played out around our own shores.
There’s another modern reference, to information covering the whole of Winston’s life being stored by and known to the ‘Algorithm’. This is relevant and pertinent and thus a worthwhile inclusion.
These are minor gripes. I’ve mentioned the superb visual and audio design of the production, and will add to this that it’s tightly written by Ryan Craig. Lindsey Posner’s pacy direction is also a big factor in its success. Both halves of the play were fully absorbing. No one was surreptitiously checking their phone that I noticed, though it might have added a new layer of irony if they were, and I forgot all about snuff, apart from at the interval.
On to the actors, none of whom I can find any major criticism at all.
David Burrell portrays Parsons more or less as I imagined him from the novel, as a minor functionary who is not a rebel like Winston, but rather a true-believer-wannabe, as someone who wants very much to not only do whatever is asked of him but also to believe that it is also for the best, for himself and for the whole. Unable to manage this, and finally seeing himself punished for his unconscious transgressions, he takes refuge in the idea that at least the next generation, as represented by his unseen daughter, will be fully able to dissolve their individuality for the greater good. It’s a fine performance by Burrell.
Ryan Craig’s Winston is perhaps a little more humorous and less worldly, at least initially than I remember from the book, and also younger, the image of the character forever fixed in my mind as Peter Cushing. But it’s still an impressive portrayal of a quiet rebel, content with the small victory represented by being able to scribble his ‘notes from the present to the future’ in his diary, at a location in his flat that is, or so he believes out of site for the omniscient telescreen. But when this small victory is joined by the thrill of his sexual encounters with Julia, he becomes intoxicated by hope, manifested by his belief that Goldstein and the Brotherhood exist, that O’Brien is part of it and is inviting him to be part of it, acknowledging openly that he is prepared to do anything to bring down Big Brother and the Party, up to and including throwing acid into the face of an innocent child, words that O’Brien with throw back at him – ‘So much for the human spirit!’ – as he is systematically broken down by pain, by irrefutable ideological logic, and by the knowledge of what lies in store for him beyond the permanently illuminated Cell, ‘The place where there is no darkness’, in Room 101. Craig plays this character arc beautifully, really coming into his own in those final chilling scenes.
Eleanor Wild’s Julia is a revelation. Even in Orwell’s original, it was always Julia who took the lead in seducing Winston and introducing her initially shy prey into carnal delights beyond his imagination; and it’s inevitable that in a modern production, in the era of the Strong Woman/Girl Boss this should be ramped up further, themes I already touched upon in my Julia novel review. She is the one with the sexual experience, proudly announcing that she has ‘known’ hundreds of men, later amended to forty or fifty in the Golden Country, after first successfully pleasuring ‘pleasuring herself’ there as a means of testing out its safety. For Julia, this Julia, the pursuit and satisfaction of physical desire away from the sexless void of the Party is victory enough in itself. She is almost nonchalant, resigned to the knowledge that this will end one day, but while she can, she’ll take her moments of joy where she can find them.
And we do get to see that joy. We don’t get to see anything overtly sexual, though the language is much more ripe than Orwell could have got away with, but we genuinely do feel the pair’s sense of liberation as they frolic together on the bare stage floor, exploding at one point into riotous shouts of ‘Fuck Big Brother!’ as the beauty of the Golden Country, of Nature, provides the ideal backdrop on the screen behind them.
But, ultimately, she herself is seduced, carried away by Winston’s hope, by his dream of a future more long-lasting freedom, though I suspect she always knows that this hope is nothing more than a blind faith that is leading her to a place that she may not necessarily have needed, at least not yet, to go. Again, this is a character arc impeccably written and impeccably realised by the performer.
Kieth Allen is, of course, the marquee name among the cast, known to me best for his role in the Comic Strip series of comedy television films in the eighties and nineties, as one of the writer/performers of ‘Vindaloo’, the third best England football team song ever, and for an excellent Channel 4 documentary casting doubt on the official narrative on the death of Diana Princess of Wales, which definitely wouldn’t get made today. Those of a younger generation may know him best as the father of pop singer Lily Allen.
Allen doesn’t disappoint. As I mentioned, when he’s not centre stage, he sits silently menacing stage left. When he is, he dominates, though not in such a way that he does not allow others, principally Craig’s Smith with whom he shares most stage time, to also shine.
For this character, there is no arc consisting of distinct phases. He is what he is at the beginning as he is at the end, the perfect ideologue and Inner-Party-man, who does what he does, be it lying about his involvement with the underground resistance or effortlessly switching between Mr. Nice and Mister Nasty as he breaks down Smith bit by bit through a combination of physical and psychological measures whilst calmly outlining the philosophical incoherence of holding on to hope in a world where power is everything, not out of any sense of self-preservation or even material gain, but because he believes, or rather he knows that it is right. You know that O’Brien has been through this same process, suitably amended for each individual ‘case’ many times and will do so many times more.
Another character brilliantly brought to life, but it would be wrong to single out Allen, or any of the cast as the ‘star’ of the show. This a real ensemble performance, and one where the word ‘ensemble’ extends to everyone involved, speaking or not speaking, on stage or behind the scenes.
The sombre, thoughtful mood of the packed audience as they left the theatre said it all.
A triumphant production.
The play is still touring, and a must-see if you get an opportunity.
Produced and Performed by the Theatre Royal, Bath
Seen at the Liverpool Playhouse
Reviewed by Anthony C Green
Written by Ryan Craig
Directed by Lindsey Posner
Cast List:
Winston Smith: Mark Quartly
Julia: Eleanor Wild
O’Brien: Keith Allen
Parson’s: David Birrell
My review of the Julia novel by Sandra Newman Julia by Sandra Newman: A Page-Turning Feminist Perspective on Orwell’s Classic | Counter Culture
Green, November C 2024 Anthony
