‘Torture porn is art imitating life’
A NIGHT at the theatre generally involves dressing to the nines, perhaps dinner at a restaurant and finally the play. Fainting, vomiting, screaming and fighting are not typically part of the experience.
Yet that’s exactly what the audience experienced at the new staging of George Orwell’s 1984, on Thursday at Broadway’s Hudson Theater after previews in London.
The play, co-written and co-directed by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, stars Tom Sturridge as Winston Smith and Olivia Wilde as his illegal love interest Julia. Like the 1949 book on which it is based, the play presents a dystopian future run by Big Brother in which a shadowy government uses propaganda, brainwashing, fake news and torture to control its subjects.
Many adaptations of the book downplayed the more graphic aspects, in particular its torture scenes, but this staging does not.
In the story, Smith is detained by Big Brother and taken to Room 101, where he is heavily tortured until his anti-Big Brother spirit breaks.
During the Room 101 scenes, his torturers yell out ominous words like “fingertips” or “teeth.” The set’s strobe lights flash maddeningly while the piercing, punishing sounds of a jackhammer fills the room. “Blood is spattered and spit out; a beating about the face,” wrote Vulture’s Christopher Bonanos, who called these scenes, “visceral, ghastly, and hair-raisingly vivid”.
In the play, as the character Smith bleeds heavily and is later electrocuted, he stares into the eyes of individual audience members and yells that they’re “complicit”.
During these scenes in London, several audience members fainted; others vomited. Police had to break up a fight after one staging. At others, audience members yelled at the actors, begging them to stop. One audience member reportedly fainted at the Broadway debut on Thursday.
That isn’t to say audiences haven’t been cautioned.
The play comes with the following warning and age restriction: “This production contains flashing lights, strobe effects, loud noises, gunshots, smoking, and graphic depictions of violence and torture. It is not suitable for children under 14.” Security guards, meanwhile, are posted around the Hudson Theater to monitor audience reactions.
New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley wrote that the stage was “lighted to chill” and the production included “nerve-shredding sound effects”.
“Though I usually don’t provide trigger warnings in my reviews, I feel obliged to do so here,” he wrote. “The interrogations that Winston undergoes in the play are graphic enough to verge on torture porn.”
Macmillan told the Hollywood Reporter: “We’re not trying to be willfully assaultive or exploitatively shock people, but there’s nothing here or in the disturbing novel that isn’t happening right now, somewhere around the world: People are being detained without trial, tortured and executed. We can sanitise that or we can simply allow it to speak for itself.”
Icke added: “You can stay and watch or you can leave – a perfectly fine reaction to watching someone be tortured. But if this show is upsetting, people are not reading the news headlines. Things are much worse than a piece of theatre getting under your skin a little bit.”
Wilde agreed, adding: “This experience allows you to empathise in a visceral way. That means making the audience physically and emotionally uncomfortable.”
The stars, meanwhile, haven’t fared much better than their audiences. Wilde and Sturridge both reportedly broke bones on set – the tailbone for Wilde and the nose for Sturridge. Wilde also dislocated her rib and split her lip during previews, the Hollywood Reporter said.
The play’s timing proved impeccable, opening to the world just months after Orwell’s politically charged novel became the best-selling book on Amazon.com in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president. Many pointed to parallels between the novel’s plot and the current political climate. 1984 isn’t the first play to recently become part of the national conversation.
Earlier this month, a New York production of Julius Caesar, starring Trump look-alike Gregg Henry, sparked national debate. In the play, Caesar is assassinated by his fellow statesmen. Given this Caesar’s likeness to the US president, many found the production in poor taste and several sponsors, including Delta and Bank of America pulled their funding. – Washington Post ·