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Adaptations of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ fail for the same reason that hero Winston Smith’s rebellion against the totalitarian Party fails – because the frail, compromised protagonist doesn’t really do anything.
A spot of illicit bonking with co-rebel Julia aside, Winston’s transgressions are purely of the mind: he is, literally, a ‘thought criminal’, which makes for a brilliant thesis of a book, but is hard to represent on screen or stage in a way that’s not monumentally boring.
But this extraordinary adaptation by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan for Headlong makes a virtue of the book’s internal nature. This ‘1984’ is set in Winston’s fracturing memory. It a horrifyingly sensual experience, a heavily stylised race through a mind collapsing under terrible pressure.
Plot-wise, Icke and Macmillan’s chief innovation is to set events not in 1984, but around 2050, ie around the time of the novel’s appendix. Mark Arends’s Winston is part of a group studying Winston Smith’s 1984 diary, which instils terrible flashbacks in 2050-Winston’s mind: he seems to exist as a survivor of state torture in both time periods. It’s a less laboured device than it sounds – the story here is basically the same story in the novel – but it serves to broaden the scope and shake off some of the book’s Cold War trappings.
It’s the medium that’s most powerful: ‘1984’ explodes in a series of shard-like, overlapping, unreliable vignettes that mirror the trauma in Winston’s mind. Characters materialise, startlingly, as if from nowhere, while scenes repeat multiple times with small, troubling differences. With no interval, and trippy enhancements from Tom Gibbons’s roaring sound design, Tim Reid’s projections and Natasha Chivers’s blinding washes of light, it becomes a mesmerically disorientating experience.
By the time Winston reaches the end of the line in torture chamber Room 101, you can feel his reality tearing as the production takes on a hallucinatory quality reminiscent of ‘The Prisoner’ at its blackest.
It’s crushingly powerful stuff, which continues the exceptional run of form the Almeida started with last year’s ‘Chimerica’. The only criticism is that the arty format may render the story borderline incomprehensible if you’ve not read the book. There’s a simple solution to that, though: read the book.