Riverside Theatre, July 25
8.5/10
This is the one that’s worth watching – while Big Brother watches you. A 2017 version at Roslyn Packer Theatre and the 2014 iteration of this Shake & Stir Theatre Co production both did scant justice to George Orwell’s masterpiece. Now Shake & Stir’s director Michael Futcher has hit upon a cast that brings Nelle Lee and Nick Skubij’s adaptation to chilling life.
Scarily, 1984 becomes more relevant with every passing year. Who’d have thought that “fake news” would now so closely mirror the Orwellian concept of “doublethink”? Meanwhile, we continue to watch rogue nations embodying Orwell’s idea that power is not a means, it’s an end.
Josh Macintosh’s set, a bleak, grey amalgam of industrial landscape and subterranean ruin, admirably serves as Winston Smith’s flat, workplace and torture chamber. The room above Charrington’s antique shop – Winston and Julia’s love nest – ingeniously opens upon the stage from a side wall, and Orwell’s all-seeing, all-pervasive telescreens are rendered in a giant screen showing videos devised by Craig Wilkinson.
But Orwell was not writing science fiction, and the most imaginative visuals in the world will not bring the book to life. That requires a brilliant script to render 350 pages down to 100 minutes without losing any essences (which Lee and Skubij have done), and compelling actors playing Winston, Julia and O’Brien (the Inner Party kingpin).
Michael Whalley is supremely convincing as Winston. He not only encapsulates the intelligence (that makes O’Brien take interest), nerdiness and loneliness, but makes real the poetic longing for a fabled world that preceded Big Brother’s rule. Whalley gives us a Winston with the cunning and bravery to flout the rules, and one capable of returning Julia’s passion.
Chloe Bayliss excels as Julia. She makes it credible that Julia can play-act perfectly in the daily Two Minutes Hate, hurling invective at the telescreen, and yet delight in sex for sex’s sake, and fall madly and unquestioningly in love. Although a role with less scope than Whalley’s, Bayliss pours herself into it to the brim.
I always imagined that Charles Dance would have made an admirable O’Brien, with his authoritative voice and ability to meld elegance and iciness, and here Tony Cogin hits upon exactly those qualities. Cruelty is so much more chilling when the perpetrator is vocally restrained and highly civilised, and Cogin is the suave and brutal incarnation of Big Brother’s right-hand man.
The cast is completed by Abhilash Kaimal (who’s good as Syme, less so as Charrington) and Steven Rooke, who superbly depicts poor Parsons, the numbskull busybody who’s denounced for “thoughtcrime” by his little daughter.
One weak link is the mimed workplace typing scene, which could be tightened, but the torture scenes are so strong they’re hard to take, and the gentleman beside me seemed to wonder what he’d done wrong to have to sit through it all. Nothing. It’s the innocents who are most endangered by creeping totalitarianism.