Up close and personal
1984 reaches out into the audience, writes Dionne Christian
The story goes like this: while watching the Broadway version of the play 1984 — with torture scenes, unexpected blackouts, pulsating sound and strobe lighting — actress Jennifer Lawrence threw up. This is the same woman who once made a movie trilogy about children killing each other in an annual, compulsory, televised death match called The Hunger Games. Surely nothing one could see or hear on stage could be more confronting than this idea?
But live theatre, watched up close and personal, resonates far more than watching something on screen, so maybe a graphic adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian novel — where society is controlled by a punishing totalitarian regime headed by a party leader called Big Brother — could be enough to make one vomit.
You can almost hear Corey McMahon, the Australian associate director of 1984, groan when he’s asked about Lawrence’s experience. McMahon’s been involved with the show since 2016 when its creative team (Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan) decided they wanted to take the production Downunder.
McMahon acknowledges 1984 is a show built around incredibly powerful lighting and sound design that audiences watch through the perspective of main character Winston Smith, an everyman who has the audacity — misfortune — to fall in love with the wrong woman, a rebel called Julia.
Because the citizens of Oceania are threatened with constant surveillance, a kind of surveillance state has been recreated on stage using eight cameras. McMahon says audiences have a “relationship” with those cameras.
“Look, it is a visceral theatrical experience,” he says. “We do reach out into the auditorium and give you a bit of a shake and it [the play] doesn’t apologise for that, so you’ve got the lighting, the sound design and the cameras . . . As the audience sits in the auditorium and observes Winston and the other characters play out on stage and also on a screen, suddenly you have a heightened theatrical engagement with the work and the themes of the work.”
So, why see a show like this? Among the music, street theatre and comedy, the New Zealand Festival in Wellington and Auckland Arts Festival include some of the most confronting theatre and dance around.
Highly-regarded Tawata Productions, led by playwright Hone Kouka and writer/theatremaker Miria George, has Bless The Child, about the death of a baby, in both festivals. Also in both is Us/Them, a hit play around the world, recommended for ages 12+, about two fictional youngsters in the Beslan hostage crisis of 2004. If you’re in Wellington, you could also catch Betroffenheit, a dance work with its roots in cocreator Jonathan Young’s experience of his daughter, niece and nephew dying in a fire during a holiday. The latter two have been described as poignant and uplifting.
AAF artistic director Jonathan Bielski believes many seek from art, intellectual and emotional depth and meaning and for it to explore ideas they themselves grapple with.
“. . . so that’s what we look to artists to do: to really be quite fearless in tackling head-on ideas that are contentious and even upsetting — but I’m not interested in shocking people for the sake of shocking people because that is not interesting at all and there’s no particular point.
“What I look for with work that’s dealing with tough subjects is ‘what is the profundity that emerges from the artistic conversation’, so what will the audience take away from dealing with something about the death of a child in a family or creeping control of government or a terrible tragedy?’”