1984 - Royal Exchange, Manchester - 06/03/10
BEFORE George Orwell's iconic novel is completely appropriated by our multi-media world this terrific – and terrifying – stage adaptation reminds us that it was a dire warning about out future . . . and not some sort of model for future society.
Big Brother and Room 101 are now TV programmes; CCTV and satellites patrol our lives; mobile phones use Newspeak; old state enemies become new allies . . . and there's a microchip in your wheelie bin!
Against such a real-life backdrop this production is actually staged with a remarkable restraint that rejects any temptation to make modern parallels, and instead sticks rigidly to the book's 1949 origins.
Director Matthew Dunster's diligence is rewarded by a performance so chillingly faithful that it often feels more like documentary than drama, but maintains the steely grip of a political thriller throughout.
Be warned though. The state torture that is at the play's climax was too much for a dozen members of the audience. The scenes in the Ministry of Love's white-tiled dungeon, underscored by Philip Gladwell's lighting and Ian Dickinson's sound, are the most harrowing I have ever experienced in live theatre.
Jonathan McGuinness, as the story's pivotal character Winston Smith, gives an astonishing performance as the troubled Everyman, tortured at first by his own doubt . . . and then by the state's apparatus. It is a gruelling three-hour portrayal of a personality's destruction.
Caroline Bartlett, a debutant theatre graduate, is remarkably assured as the head-turning Julia, intent on Sex Crime; Matthew Flynn is a cruelly persuasive O'Brien; and Paul Moriarty, as the counter-revolutionary Goldstein is so 'doubleplusungood' in his delivery of a speech of sedition that he rightly earns his own applause.
Everyone should be watching this Big Brother, if only so we cannot say we weren't warned.
It runs until March 27.
David Upton
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