1984 (Playhouse Theatre, 22 September)

A masterclass in the uncomfortable-making features of technical theatrecraft, attached to about as dumb a take on the material as might be imagined. I was consistently amazed by the production's making characters appear and disappear from the stage; things I'd only read about in Victorian extravaganzas seemed to be happening here. Some of the louder, janglier effects were crudely effective, but at this point I've seen torture onstage so much in London that I felt like a jaded conoisseur--yes, yes, the take-your-fingers-off-machine again, like in Cleansed; how blase. I'm starting to see why the Grand Guignol had such a variety of implements of bleeding: twice exactly seems to be the number of times you can see a torture method onstage without finding it sort of dull. And may this be the last production (it will not be the last production) to abuse projected video.

But oh, the take on the material. This seemed to be a production of the play Big Brother might have loved: relentlessly uninterested in sex, or indeed in private moments of any kind; heavily invested in torture, video, and in jangling us out of any kind of interiority of our own. A cleverer production might have made something of this; this one just propped the original's reverence for the printed word amidst a set of technical stage exercises that made books, print, and thinking irrelevant. The production displayed a headlong interest in getting the rats onstage, and by god they got 'em, amidst the loudest and most extended of the technical exercises. Maybe this was the point: that modern media are so overwhelming that books are on the way out. But then why show barely a minute of writing, and fifteen glorious moments of torture? Why, additionally, does Big Brother seem obsessed with having Winston read something, given that there's apparently video evidence of him doing everything else? I realized that the last thing I had seen at this theatre was Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games; at about the midway point in this, I longed for the holographic Flatleys. 

And then some characters appear at the beginning and end, who are: a book club? In the future of this future? Reading the text of 1984 like it was a diary? Only sometimes Winston can hear them? And the nice older lady was talking about her feelings. If only one of them could have had a flash bulb in their head, or spoken via a megaphone, or transformed into a giant robot or something, they might have found their place amidst the general pandemonium. As it stands this was Bambi vs. Godzilla: five nice people having a chat are as nothing next to the man-sized flashbulbs. 

No actor in this production stood out to me as much as the effect of having a character suddenly appear and then disappear, like a ghost, in the background; no emotion stood out at all. Winston Smith seemed, before he seemed like a man having his teeth pulled out, like a man having a bad day at work; granted this is true, but still. I fear, now, the future of theatergoing: a video screen projecting a human face on a giant wall in the West End, forever. 

God knows what this actually is: the late, late West End undeath of a production that started at the Almeida two years ago, has toured the world, and is now back to rake in money from the sort of people who think any mention of Orwell's name is Important. (The person in front of me gave this a standing ovation.) But this production had by this point drifted so far into theme-park territory that, again, I thought it of the devil's party. What if Big Brother won out because spectacle is awesome?