By George, it’s Orwell
It’s a novel that turned the looking glass to a future not unlike today and now George Orwell’s 1984 is on stage. Carly Thomas went along to a rehearsal.
Imagine having George Orwell as a guest at your dinner table. The conversation would no doubt turn to politics. Orwell was a man who thought heavily on social justice and leaned in hard against totalitarianism. Pass him some wine and he might even make a few prophecies.
They would be worth listening to if he did. His novel 1984 was published in 1949 and it foresaw a world of domestic control, total subservience and a police state where ‘‘big brother’’ watches over everyone, at all times.
Now imagine having Donald Trump walk into the dinner party. What a meeting that would be.
Sales on the novel rose like a tide when a senior White House official, Kellyanne Conway, used the term ‘‘alternative facts’’ during a discussion about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration.
Some commentators denounced her expression as ‘‘Orwellian’’ and the novel pushed its way into Amazon’s top 10 bestsellers list. Trump, you’d better bring a magnum of wine to the table.
The irony of the world Orwell created in his dystopian novel and the state of the world today does not pass over Manawatu Theatre Inc’s director Scott Andrew. It settles darkly in the claustrophobic rehearsal room at Palmerston North’s Globe Theatre and it creates a fog of discussion.
These actors are invested. The play is intense, important and ruthless. Andrew says when you put it into today’s context it is quite ‘‘mindblowing’’.
‘‘There are so many things happening in the world today that isn’t, or can’t be, talked about. It was a cautionary tale, filled with a lot of taboo stuff. This play puts it right in front of everybody’s face. The idea with this version is to make the audience feel really uncomfortable, like a silent witness to an interrogation. The audience will feel complicit.’’
This adaptation by Michael Gene Sullivan is not a straightout-of-the-book copy. It turns the novel upside down and gives it a firm shake, with the ending becoming the beginning.
A ferocious and not-unfamiliar world is thrust in front of you. The central character Winston Smith has been caught and forced to confess his ‘‘thought crimes’’ and the audience becomes a silent witness to his torture. At one point, the fourth wall is broken and one of the actors eyeballs the audience, silently imploring them ‘‘shall I stop’’?
The play, says Andrew, was written in the George Bush era and the set is based on a Guantanamo Bay torture room, so heck, we may as well bring Bush into the party for a whiskey and cigar with Orwell and Trump.
‘‘It’s all so relevant,’’ says Andrew, ‘‘and anyone who sits here and watches it will feel it and reflect on our society now. It’s really about how we become machines. It’s all very palpable’’.
When Orwell wrote 1984, he was dying and there is an urgency in his writing. The actual penning of it was done in different inks – as one pen ran out another was begun. There is an imperativeness to the play as well. Andrew says it is ‘‘relentless. It makes you squirm.
‘‘It is all there right in front of us and it is uncomfortable. But it’s important.’’
Orwell faced the devils who