This is Nottingham --DO a quick poll of everybody you know who's read Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Well, first check to make sure they've actually read it; according to a 2009 poll, Orwell's masterpiece is the book Britons most often claim to have read when they actually haven't. You might need to administer a little quiz.
After that, ask one follow-up question: did you read the appendix?
Answers will most likely range from "No" to "There's an appendix?". But there is one – Orwell considered it the novel's final chapter. And a new stage adaptation of the book aims to incorporate Orwell's entire work – appendix included – to produce a new yet true-to-the-work take.
Nottingham Playhouse has teamed up with theatre company Headlong to create a work that attempts to cling closely to Orwell's ideas while getting away from the grey-skies-and-blue-boiler-suits optics that usually accompany stage or screen adaptations.
"If you do a simple straightforward gusting winds, concrete and grey walls, you're not doing the whole novel and what it's thinking about – the brilliance of what Orwell did," says Robert Icke, who created the adaptation with Duncan Macmillan.
"Duncan and I got very interested in the structure of the novel was and what Orwell was actually trying to do as opposed to our cultural interpretations of it."
Crucial to that structure and purpose is the appendix. It complicates the novel. Written at a time in the future, it explains that all you've just read about is over, that Big Brother and Newspeak failed – defeated, in essence, by language itself. The appendix turns the novel into a primary text.
"One of the things it does to the novel is pulls the camera right back," Robert says. "The novel actively asks you to look at it as history rather than as present.
"The novel right from the start, even if you read it from 1948, it's a 1984 that's already happened."
The Orwell estate, which controls the rights to the book and gave permission for the production, told them they were the first to use the appendix in an adaptation. The pair reckon the book's caretakers recognise their efforts to stay true to Orwell.
It's difficult to explain in too great detail how they bring the appendix to life onstage. It's important to remember that the rest of the book throws up a few chronological inconsistencies and other slight discrepancies that make the reader question what's actually happening to Winston Smith and his lover, Julia.
"There's certain things in the books which undermine it all the way through," Duncan says.
And it's there on purpose. A major concept and force in the book is, of course, Doublethink – the ability to believe two contrary things at the same time. In the play – as in what are perhaps the truest interpretations of the book – everything that follows is true and not true, good and bad.
In previews of the play, audience members have been very certain about what they've seen – and there have been big arguments
"They seem to have seen very different plays," Duncan says. "It's possible to read it and experience it many, many ways at once."
For the playwrights, depicting that on stage has been the big challenge.
Says Duncan: "We want to make sure that everything can exist in many ways and in many worlds."
Again, they don't want to give too much away. But embracing the appendix has proved crucial for them.
"The challenge is not how you literally show the appendix on stage," Robert says.
"You're looking at how to take the experience of the novel and giving the audience the same punch on stage."
That punch is, of course, heightened by what's in the news. In a post-Edward Snowden world, where new revelations come out almost weekly about how far into citizens' lives the UK and US governments are delving, Orwell's late-1940s work is enjoying one of its regular moments of heightened interest.
Robert compares it, and the times, to Shakespearean works that often get invoked for parallels to the political debates of the day.
"I sometimes think that I've seen Shakespeare plays that are in orbit – sometimes they're orbiting closer to us and sometimes they're farther away," he says. "The really great ones are never too far away, they're just in a different position."
Nineteen Eighty-Four is now in close orbit. But the team will let the relevance speak for itself without trying to coax it out even more.
"We took a decision not to really obviously hammer out a really obvious contemporary relevance," Robert says.
"You could play this game for ages but ... you're obviously not doing justice to the whole." Reported by This is 4 hours ago.