*Almeida; Theatre Royal Stratford East, London*
Orwell's 1984 comes to tremendous, hellish life. And Joan Littlewood's satire still bites
It is hugely ambitious to put this dystopia on stage. Hard to conjure up both personal threat and universal miasma. Harder still as the vision is expressed in phrases – Big Brother, doublethink, Thought Police – that are now mumbled over breakfast. Hardest yet when what was once an ultimate horror – Room 101 – is almost better known as the title of a chat show.
In adapting and directing *1984* – complete with the Room, though not with full-frontal rats – Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan have pulled off something tremendous. Their production for Headlong and Nottingham Playhouse, where the play was first seen last year, has elements both of horror story and of trance. Crucially, they base their version on George Orwell's appendix to his novel, in which the principles of Newspeak are discussed as if by a rather fusty lexicographer, and the viewpoint and timescale of the action are thrown into doubt. Winston Smith's story of love and protest against totalitarianism is framed by the meetings of a book club whose members are picking over his secret diary.
A less thoroughgoing re-creation would have gone in for updating and for much underlining of Orwellian prescience. Icke and Macmillan are infinitely more imaginative. Past and future, the actual and the virtual constantly collide. Episodes are repeated as if everything was on a loop. Chloe Lamford's set and costumes in part evoke the date of the novel's composition, along with drifts of 1940s music and bossy RP voices over the loudspeakers. There are knitted waistcoats, big lace-up girls' shoes, brown polished wood panels and a misty line of windows, through which characters gloom as on an early blurry telly. It's a world exploded to marvellous effect when Winston finds love, and to terrifying effect when all particularity is stripped from the stage in a featureless grey space. It's a world that has another dimension in Tim Reid's videos. Winston is constantly asking "Where am I?" but he might equally be asking "When am I?" or indeed "What am I?", flesh or fabrication? Chillingly, the moments when he and his lover think themselves most alone, and most real, are played out on screen.
As Winston, Mark Arends begins like a startled hare, quivering with eagerness, easily led into agreeing that he would throw sulphuric acid into the face of a child. He ends as a wretched scrap of flesh; in a torture scene that is hard to watch, his mouth and fingertips drip blood and his brain seems to leak energy. It's a vibrant performance which has an excellent counterpart in Tim Dutton. He plays the inquisitor antagonist with the authority and poise of a senior civil servant putting in to run the BBC. The audience becomes another layer in Orwell's circles of surveillance. It is one of the feats of this important play that you realise this complicity only later. Artistic director Rupert Goold is making the Almeida essential again.
Who needs to invent a dystopia when you have the first world war? When *Oh What a Lovely War* was first staged in 1963, it struck the Guardian critic as being as "unfair as any powerful cartoon", and the audiences at Stratford East as being a very good idea. Its transfer to the West End was for a time blocked by the censor but Princess Margaret liked it and said so, and off it went for a successful run. Joan Littlewood had achieved both her aims: a hard-hitting show and a popular success.
It now looks more like a landmark than an earthquake. Triggered by a radio programme, drawing on data about the first world war dug up by Alan Clark (who sued Littlewood for a credit), fuelled by hatred of RC Sherriff's Journey's End, Littlewood set out to create a show that would tell little-known truths in a startling theatrical manner. The battles were to be seen from the point of view of the men rather than the officers. There would be no jingoism or sentimentality. When she hit on the notion of framing the story in a pierrot show, with ditties and mournful ballads and parlour song intercut with satirical sketches, she found a way of mixing the sardonic and the heart-rending, and of delivering bitter facts with buoyancy.
This is honoured in Terry Johnson's production. The pierrots, tragically jocund, caper through Lez Brotherston's design, which swathes the Theatre Royal in festoons of union jacks. Floppy pyjama costumes are invaded by unyielding uniforms. Black-and-white footage of the trenches plays intermittently. A ticker-tape bulletin of the number of casualties glitters in the background like a star in waiting.
The songs are the lifeblood of the show and they are wonders. Mournful, manipulative, scathing, witty and lewd, they provide strong and desolating moments. Caroline Quentin radiates both plumminess and precariousness. She is a splendid musical hall star, with bolster bosom and fishtail evening gown, mellow voice and ironical, saucy mouth. She's a courageous Mrs Pankhurst, pelted by a howling crowd while she delivers Bernard Shaw's anti-war blast.
The satirical sketches have worn less well. The sergeant major who barks out gibberish, the Russians with funny beards are no longer comically startling. You don't have to agree with Michael Gove (who gets a photo-check as a donkey) and his view of history to feel that some power has faded from the show. In Bertrand Russell's fervent letter of praise to the theatre, he says: "I wonder that it has been allowed on a London stage." It is hard to recapture that utter surprise: the show has educated audiences by its attitudes and techniques. We could do with Joan Littlewood now to lash out in inventive ways at more recent wars.
Star ratings (out of 5)
1984 *****
Oh What a Lovely War *** Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 days ago.
Orwell's 1984 comes to tremendous, hellish life. And Joan Littlewood's satire still bites
It is hugely ambitious to put this dystopia on stage. Hard to conjure up both personal threat and universal miasma. Harder still as the vision is expressed in phrases – Big Brother, doublethink, Thought Police – that are now mumbled over breakfast. Hardest yet when what was once an ultimate horror – Room 101 – is almost better known as the title of a chat show.
In adapting and directing *1984* – complete with the Room, though not with full-frontal rats – Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan have pulled off something tremendous. Their production for Headlong and Nottingham Playhouse, where the play was first seen last year, has elements both of horror story and of trance. Crucially, they base their version on George Orwell's appendix to his novel, in which the principles of Newspeak are discussed as if by a rather fusty lexicographer, and the viewpoint and timescale of the action are thrown into doubt. Winston Smith's story of love and protest against totalitarianism is framed by the meetings of a book club whose members are picking over his secret diary.
A less thoroughgoing re-creation would have gone in for updating and for much underlining of Orwellian prescience. Icke and Macmillan are infinitely more imaginative. Past and future, the actual and the virtual constantly collide. Episodes are repeated as if everything was on a loop. Chloe Lamford's set and costumes in part evoke the date of the novel's composition, along with drifts of 1940s music and bossy RP voices over the loudspeakers. There are knitted waistcoats, big lace-up girls' shoes, brown polished wood panels and a misty line of windows, through which characters gloom as on an early blurry telly. It's a world exploded to marvellous effect when Winston finds love, and to terrifying effect when all particularity is stripped from the stage in a featureless grey space. It's a world that has another dimension in Tim Reid's videos. Winston is constantly asking "Where am I?" but he might equally be asking "When am I?" or indeed "What am I?", flesh or fabrication? Chillingly, the moments when he and his lover think themselves most alone, and most real, are played out on screen.
As Winston, Mark Arends begins like a startled hare, quivering with eagerness, easily led into agreeing that he would throw sulphuric acid into the face of a child. He ends as a wretched scrap of flesh; in a torture scene that is hard to watch, his mouth and fingertips drip blood and his brain seems to leak energy. It's a vibrant performance which has an excellent counterpart in Tim Dutton. He plays the inquisitor antagonist with the authority and poise of a senior civil servant putting in to run the BBC. The audience becomes another layer in Orwell's circles of surveillance. It is one of the feats of this important play that you realise this complicity only later. Artistic director Rupert Goold is making the Almeida essential again.
Who needs to invent a dystopia when you have the first world war? When *Oh What a Lovely War* was first staged in 1963, it struck the Guardian critic as being as "unfair as any powerful cartoon", and the audiences at Stratford East as being a very good idea. Its transfer to the West End was for a time blocked by the censor but Princess Margaret liked it and said so, and off it went for a successful run. Joan Littlewood had achieved both her aims: a hard-hitting show and a popular success.
It now looks more like a landmark than an earthquake. Triggered by a radio programme, drawing on data about the first world war dug up by Alan Clark (who sued Littlewood for a credit), fuelled by hatred of RC Sherriff's Journey's End, Littlewood set out to create a show that would tell little-known truths in a startling theatrical manner. The battles were to be seen from the point of view of the men rather than the officers. There would be no jingoism or sentimentality. When she hit on the notion of framing the story in a pierrot show, with ditties and mournful ballads and parlour song intercut with satirical sketches, she found a way of mixing the sardonic and the heart-rending, and of delivering bitter facts with buoyancy.
This is honoured in Terry Johnson's production. The pierrots, tragically jocund, caper through Lez Brotherston's design, which swathes the Theatre Royal in festoons of union jacks. Floppy pyjama costumes are invaded by unyielding uniforms. Black-and-white footage of the trenches plays intermittently. A ticker-tape bulletin of the number of casualties glitters in the background like a star in waiting.
The songs are the lifeblood of the show and they are wonders. Mournful, manipulative, scathing, witty and lewd, they provide strong and desolating moments. Caroline Quentin radiates both plumminess and precariousness. She is a splendid musical hall star, with bolster bosom and fishtail evening gown, mellow voice and ironical, saucy mouth. She's a courageous Mrs Pankhurst, pelted by a howling crowd while she delivers Bernard Shaw's anti-war blast.
The satirical sketches have worn less well. The sergeant major who barks out gibberish, the Russians with funny beards are no longer comically startling. You don't have to agree with Michael Gove (who gets a photo-check as a donkey) and his view of history to feel that some power has faded from the show. In Bertrand Russell's fervent letter of praise to the theatre, he says: "I wonder that it has been allowed on a London stage." It is hard to recapture that utter surprise: the show has educated audiences by its attitudes and techniques. We could do with Joan Littlewood now to lash out in inventive ways at more recent wars.
Star ratings (out of 5)
1984 *****
Oh What a Lovely War *** Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 days ago.