1984

I’m 16-years-old. I’m in my Nan’s spare room (I’m here because it’s the summer holiday). I’m lying in bed. On the floor is my Sony Discman. The disc spinning inside: Elbow’s debut, Asleep in the Back. (When considering the band's recent output of over-produced melancholia, Asleep is a curiosity. Incongruous to the rest of their work, the album is a horror show put to audio: it sounds like an abandoned building that's lights have been punched out by poverty and paranoia. It scares the shit out of me.) While the soundtrack spins in my ear, my eyes are making a movie of the letters beneath. In my hands, 1984: Orwell’s dystopian nightmare of surveillance and interrogation. In having Guy Garvey provide the score for this read, I've made a rod for my own back: Orwell’s landscape becomes more disturbing when coupled with the album; Garvey’s soundscape becomes more distressing when coupled with the book. Like Special Brew and Absinthe, the two shouldn’t be put together. Impervious to consequence, I make a tall glass of the two and toast oblivion.

I’m now 30-years-old. I’m in the Playhouse Theatre, readying myself for Headlong’s adaptation of 1984. A poster warning audiences that the performance contains scenes of gunshots and blood and torture has freaked my girlfriend out. (She hasn't read the book and my three word synopsis of 'brutality,' 'horrifying' and 'disturbing' might not have helped.) It also re-assures patrons that the animals used in the production are under the governance of specialist handlers. This detail is evidence that the mind games have already begun. Most people in the theatre are aware of the book: when they read the sign, they think ‘rats.’ Questions began to abound: Is the actor going to go ‘method’ with the final scene? Are we about to witness a Bush Tucker trial live on stage? The boy in me, one predisposed to adrenaline, immune to fear smiles; the man, on the other hand, checks his brow and prays for safety.

Together, we begin our ascent to the viewing gallery to watch the torture unfold. On the staircase we’re addressed by an usher, warning us there will be no re-admittance, that there is no interval, that the play is 101 minutes long. The denial of a break is an inspired decision. Just as Winston’s subjugation is total and unrelenting, so is ours. There will be no half-time succour of ice cream and Facebook to retain equilibrium; no, Winston’s world will be our world until the curtain says otherwise.

The play begins by plunging us into darkness. (The disorientating use of lighting will be a recurring motif throughout the play.) When the lights do arrive, Winston Smith, centred, sits at a desk penning a journal. He is just out of a sight of a telescreen, an apparatus of control that allows the State to look in on you and observe your behaviour. In 1984, a diary is a weapon of rebellion, anything that allows someone to register the past is suppressed- the past after all is a foreign country: they do things differently there. The state of Big Brother does not want people to know of difference.  An understanding of the past gives people a context with which to scrutinize their present: the objective of a totalitarian state is to be impregnable to such scrutiny. Although the details of Winston’s diary are cold and dead-eyed, documenting bland observations, it is the start of his spiritual awakening.

 The next scene took me by surprise. Instead of tracking Winston’s growing defiance, we’re transported to a book group, whose attendees debate the book. For people who haven’t read the source, this does not appear in the novel. Initially, I thought this scene was pat-on-the-back postmodernism, discussing the author’s work. Instead they’re doing something that is totally in keeping with the story. At the back of 1984 is a little-read appendix that documents the fall of Big Brother; its first sentence reads (‘Newspeak was the official language of Oceania.’) Was shows the system and its language collapsed and in its place was a return to thought and freedom. The main story is a bleak predictor of fascist rule, but the appendix is Orwell’s positive belief that tyranny can be overcome. The book group, therefore, takes place in a post-Big Brother world. Delightfully, the production nods at how some things have improved (the language of the people has been restored and returned back to the people) and how some things haven’t changed (people are still in thrall to the screens: this time though its mobile phones, not telescreens).

The book group

Other than this addition, the play stays largely loyal to the text. That’s not to say Headlong’s adaptation is regurgitation; it’s far too imaginative for that. For instance, a scene is repeated three times to show the deadening malaise of living in a system opposed to expression. Winston goes to work and is told day after day the same anecdote by a colleague. Alongside this recollection, a cleaner scrubs the floor with the taut gestures of a machine – under Big Brother people have become automatons, incapable of intimacy and thought. Another inspired moment is when Winston enters into an affair with another State worker, Julia. Finding sexual refuge in the back room of an antique shop, the audience becomes the State, observing the unfolding rebellion on an overhead telescreen. What makes the production truly revelatory though is its staging of the iconic torture scene. Do those rats make an appearance? You’ll have to go along to find out.

Thank God, this kind of torture doesn't exist now.

1984 has finished its London run, but the production re-commences its tour in Bath on the 9^th September.