Doubleplusgood

And so to the theatre. The West Yorkshire Playhouse was the venue for Headlong Theatre’s interpretation of 1984. I didn’t anticipate a bundle of laughs, and so it proved. Orwell’s prophetic (a population always under surveillance through screens, the mass of the people kept subservient and amused by manufactured entertainment, internal oppression justified by constant conflict overseas and exaggerated threat of terrorism at home) and gloomy (“the future is a boot stamping on a human face forever”) satire/warning was as disturbing as ever. 

Headlong bill themselves as a digital company and I had rather wondered what that meant. Well, simply enough it means that they use lots of video. Indeed some quite important parts of the action (those in the back room of the antiques shop) took place off stage and were relayed and projected. The staging was also excellent in more conventional ways with a clever coup de theatre when Winston Smith was taken in for interrogation. Also clever was the use of the book’s often overlooked (and in some senses cheerful) appendix to create a device where Smith’s diaries were framed as being read by a book group – a fairly fatuous book group at that.

So an excellent production. If I have a gripe it is about the source material. The first part of the book, in which the dystopian vision of IngSoc, two minute hates and newspeak is unfolded, is of the highest class. But I have never really bought into the second part: brainwashing, betrayal and rats in Room 101. Why didn’t they just shoot him – and her come to that? Given the unpersonning of various other characters along the way then why invest all that time in Smith?