At times, it seemed that the Headlong Theatre Company’s production of 1984 used all the tricks of a horror movie to unsettle its audience. The play took place on a musty set with bookshelves and a plain wooden table. The protagonist—the victim—wandered blankly around this set, haunted by the feeling that he was being watched. And he was. The walls had eyes. Rooms full of people turned in unison to fixate on him with blank stares. A girl in a dress recited a nursery rhyme in a dead voice.
This kind of psychological goosing was derivative, but it at least fit the subject material. 1984, the classic novel by George Orwell, is about as horrifying as anything that has been written, and the Orwellian regimes that still exist in this world are as horrifying as anything imagined in fiction. While it is often treated like a punch line, who can look at North Korea and not see a nightmarish hellscape, down to the guitar-playing children?
Not all of the play’s tricks are unoriginal. The play bills itself as a "radical multimedia production," and so it is. Above the stage is a long projection screen that is used creatively throughout the play. It broadcasts the Two Minutes Hate, which was very nicely hateful, and later broadcasts the confession of Winston Smith (Matthew Spencer) from the bowels of the Ministry of Love. The screen was also used to relay footage from an offstage set, the supposedly secret room that was rented by Winston and his lover-liberator, Julia (Hara Yannas), to avoid the watchful eyes of Big Brother. In this room, Winston and Julia make love, drink real coffee, and otherwise discover their humanity. Their intimate moments are witnessed by the audience on a telescreen of sorts—just as they are witnessed by the Thought Police, which had the room bugged from the outset.
The play succeeded in conveying the claustrophobia, the incessant surveillance, that is central to totalitarianism. With the exception of the first scene, Winston is never alone on the stage. The other characters seem to orbit around him, going about their activities but always keeping tabs on him, as though they know he is the main character—the thought criminal. Like Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, where the lovers are never allowed a moment alone, the effect is to make the audience conscious that Winston’s every action in the totalitarian state of Oceania is a public action.
Still, I found much to dislike. For one, the play is bloody, bloody, bloody. From its first moments it is bloody: when the curtain opens on Winston laboring over his diary, committing thoughtcrime in the open for the first time, he develops a nosebleed that spatters blood on the page. The detail probably was meant as a physical manifestation of Winston’s agony and distress, like Christ sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, but I thought for one mortifying second it was unscripted, so unnecessary did it seem. It got worse. Once Winston and Julia were captured in their lover’s nest, the stage was deconstructed before the audience’s eyes in a fantastic technical display and reassembled as the stripped-down industrial torture chamber known as the Ministry of Love. In that instant, a play that at times resembled The Shining became Saw. Winston's fingernails and teeth are torn out by agents of the party as they "treat" him for thoughtcrime. We see the poor wretch gush mouthfuls of blood onto the ministry’s sterile white floor as they holster their instruments.
Was this torture necessary or textual? Not really. In the book the ministry’s main inquisitor, O’Brien (Tim Dutton), pulls out one of Winston’s teeth during a monologue about how he is the last man—and a pitiful one at that. One tooth, evidently, was not enough to make the point. The director demanded them all. It was gratuitous. Worse, it detracted from the gravity of the scene by making it almost comic in its campiness. Between this and the play’s intense strobe light effects, I saw several elderly audience members leave the theatre. At the risk of sounding lame, I side with the bluehairs.
The complaint above hints at a more substantive problem with the play: some of Orwell’s most poignant lines are swamped by a show that seems more concerned with dubstep-y effects and spectacle. The Thought Police’s chilling line to Winston and Julia announcing their arrival ("You are the dead") was delivered in an underwhelming electronic voice that my theater companion compared to Siri. The important dialogue between Winston and O’Brien during the last quarter of the play is difficult to follow through the bloody circus of the Ministry of Love.
The unbalanced levels of violence and spectacle are not the only problems. The play also includes a peculiar and annoying metanarrative commenting on the relevance of 1984 in two scenes, one inserted at the beginning of the performance and one at the end. The audience and Winston are transported some time into the future after the fall of the English Socialist (‘IngSoc’) system. A college seminar is taking place, and it is discussing Winston’s journal as a historical artifact, much as a college seminar today might discuss the diary of Anne Frank or the Gulag Archipelago. The professor says that the journal has enduring value because every generation projects its own concerns about security and privacy onto the book. As he delivers his lecture, his students are interrupted by the beeping and ringing of their cell phones. In the corner, a young girl is glued to a television screen. The not-so-subtle implication (made explicit by this essay printed in the playbill) is that Big Brother lives on "in the world of neoliberal capitalism" in iPhones and trashy television and targeted advertising on Facebook and the National Security Agency and what have you.
Then the play rolls on, and the audience sees the small, wavering flame of Winston’s humanity extinguished by the Thought Police. The boot stamps on the human face, if not forever then for quite a long time. In this context, the play’s classroom commentary seems as sophomoric as a dormitory bull session. Could the theater company think of no better example of totalitarianism in the world than… smartphone addiction?
One exception to my grumbling should be noted: in one important case, the play staged a difficult passage well. The final paragraph of Orwell’s text, Winston’s final surrender, reads as follows:
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
The play compresses this internal monologue into one line. Winston is seated, looking directly out at the audience, with O’Brien’s hand placed fraternally on his shoulder. "Thank you," Winston says, partly to O’Brien, partly to the audience, partly to Big Brother. Curtain.
If the theatre company had been as confident in the power of simplicity with the rest of the play as with this gut punch of a line, its production of 1984 might have been great.