'1984' - Play review

Just as a warning I've seen this play once before already and worked a lot out about it, so there will be definite spoilers. Careful reading if you haven't seen it, I want to mention everything about how awesome it was.

Last year for my Drama and Theatre Studies AS I was fortunate enough to go on a trip to Salisbury to watch Headlong's '1984' in the Salisbury Playhouse. I ended up writing about it in my 'Live productions scene' exam and got an A for drama overall. So you can understand my excitement when, almost exactly a year later, I learn that Headlong are bringing back their '1984' and to my local Nuffield Theatre.

There's something to be said for saying the play more than once. If it's just the same script done by different companies that can be helpful, as I'm learning from my watching of all the Shakespeare films I can get my hands on, for seeing the various ways the text can be interpreted, and through that odd form of cross-examination getting closer to what the original writer may have been trying to say.

But watching the exact same show is something quite different entirely, especially with the long time difference.
long sentence warning Not only have I grown up a lot since then (first moving to mainland England vs. now being a fully established Southampton-goer), and have I consolidated my ideas politically, and have I branched out philosophically - but I've read the book twice (and 'Animal Farm' and the essays of 'Shooting an Elephant') and seen the 1984 film. I just feel I understood a lot more of what was going on - some of the deeper questions on the nature of reality and lies, existence and individuality; whether the fight for political freedom could be considered selfish. It's just a truly fantastic play. It's not so much an adaptation of the book '1984' as it is an exploration of it - indeed it's a sort of 'play within a play' setup in that it opens with a book club in the future discussing the motives for Winston writing his diary (as in, they're reading the book).

The adaptation is certainly very clever - there's a lot of foreshadowing and references which I naively didn't notice the first time, just little things which really send a shiver down your spine if you've read around Orwell a little. The repetitions of certain lines, scenes and motifs were eery and effective in creating the world of Winston's tortured mind, not gimmicky in the way that things like those are when Steven Moffat does it in the latest seasons of 'Doctor Who'.

And, politically the play is very true to Orwell, specifically in the discussions of the book club. Certainly a lot of the things Winston says to Julia (a lot of which would have been his internal thoughts in the book) were very inspirational, and bought into question a lot of the futility of asking for change. The phrase 'we are the dead' was really played on, and after seeing it a second time I finally got it: Winston and Julia were born in a world which is already dead, they're just trying to make a life for the next generation. However a lot of the post-apocalyptic, dystopian elements of Winston's story we can't really relate to as an audience, we live in a democracy of course and the things we complain about, surveillance, digital snooping, political assassinations, senseless wars, they exist in our world but not to the far extreme that they do in Orwell's imagined future. It's through the setting of the book club, and through playing the story through that setting, that the very extreme dystopia get related to our imperfect world. Therefore, a lot of the analyses of the book club are very subtle (yet very blatant) references to recent events, or at least they draw things to mind, like the NSA snooping, or the Iraq war, etc., etc., relating things to present times and situations, suggesting that we aren't quite as in control as we think we are. One of the last lines in the play is from a lady in the book club, saying something about how if the party really existed surely they'd want to hide themselves and make us think they could never exist. Now that does sound completely paranoiac and ridiculous - but if you think about Orwell's latter years, maybe that's exactly how it was meant to sound.

The cast are absolutely phenomenal. Incredible ensemble work, some things I mightn't have even thought possible, like everyone giving a round of applause and stopping at the exact same moment, or even slowing to slow motion and stopping at the exact same time, or the lights going down for barely a few seconds and the characters appearing in their places when the lights come up, none of them in any way out of breath.

Literally, this is how packed the auditorium was 20 minutes before the show.

I think the Winston in the previous year's cast was better then this one, but given his phenomenal performance it'd be hard for the new one to better him. That said, he was a great Winston, the underdog when he needed to be, with the hatred for big brother and the burning just below the surface, ready to burst out whenever it needed to. And of course his scenes with Julia were very sexy, but that was mostly Julia. It was the combination of sexy and destruction, attempting to undress each other while throwing a chair across the room.

Of course my favourite character/actor (my favourite character, played by my favourite actor) was O'Brien, in both performances. I wrote about him in my exam, let me tell you. It's just the way he exudes power and confidence, how he utterly crushed Winston in his speech in the Ministry of Love, how at the end of that speech I honestly thought he was about to hover above the ground when he said that he could. He's never at a disadvantage, he's always calm and superior until he has the advantage, then his rage and fury come out, then I saw the power of a man at the top who knows he's at the top.

There wasn't really music to speak of, but lighting and sound came together beautiful to create the world… okay I'll admit it - I have a definite idea of the world this play is set in. Up until the penultimate scene of the electroshock therapy, the whole play is the confused memories he tries to grasp at. Hence characters appear in random places, objects turn up in the wrong setting and characters repeat other in different scenes. Hence scenes are punctuated by high pitched screeching or blackouts, hence the lack of chronological order to it, hence O'Brien's voice pervades though the whole thing as an omnipresent voiceover, cause that is the inside of Winston's head when he's in the Ministry of Love.

The set change was truly awesome, epic. And I don't mean that in the typical teenager way, I literally mean in the classical sense. A troop of soldiers literally rip apart the bookshop, under a soundtrack of white noise, electrical garble, a booming announcer telling the captured Winston to keep on his knees and a roaring helicopter. It's replaced with just white sheets for walls and a white floor, and just as O'Brien ominously says 'you told me once we'd meet again in the place where there is no darkness', intense white floodlights light up the stage. No shadows, no colour except for the people on stage and the bloodstains on the floor as Winston is mutilated by the members of the Ministry of Love.

A truly truly epic play, I would recommend this play to anyone. The tour's still going, you can catch it at the Nuffield tomorrow if you're lucky (but I think it's sold out) or on the rest of their tour. I'm telling you this. Watch. This. Play. First time I've done this and not kidding here, 10/10. I would watch it a third time if it came around next year.

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