CityLife

Preview: 1984 - Royal Exchange

Jonathan McGuinness as Winston Smith

Hailed as an instant classic on its publication in 1949, George Orwell’s 1984 is now seen by many as one of the definitive novels of the 20th century.

The central character, Winston Smith rewrites history for the Ministry of Truth, but when a woman he hardly knows hands him a note saying ‘I love you’, he decides to risk everything in a search for the real truth.

With the government always watching, can Winston possibly hold on to what he feels inside, or will he renounce everything and accept The Party’s reality?

Will he learn to love Big Brother, representing in this case something even more terrifying than a televised celebration of banality and idiocy?

The new stage version of 1984 at the Royal Exchange from this weekend is directed and written by Oldham-born actor, director and playwright Matthew Dunster, whose other Exchange credits include a truly searing version of Macbeth and his own MEN Theatre award-winning play You Can See The Hills, which also played to packed houses in London’s Young Vic Theatre.

Matthew’s involvement in 1984 began when, through a string of production circumstances, another project for the Exchange was postponed.

Back in July, he was presented with the possibility of directing 1984 from someone else’s adaptation. Very soon, though, he realised that he needed to take the writing reins himself.

“It’s strange how adaptations can go out of fashion in a way that a book can’t,” he muses.

“Unavoidably, an adaptation is the adapter’s response to the material and that response is infused by where you live, who you are and what’s going on around you.

“We – that is myself and the artistic team here – knew we were coming to this book because of the torture, supposedly in our name, because of what’s being going on post-Iraq conflict and Afghan conflict.

“We also knew that we were coming at it because of the increasing powers of surveillance that are given to people. For instance, I learned just the other week that, in the run-up to the Olympics, the same sort of low-flying, pilotless spy aircraft that they use in Afghanistan will be in use over our cities.

'Revealing'

“I know nobody has asked me if that’s what I want!

“So you come at the book loaded with your own politics, which is why I wanted to do my own adaptation.

“I was determined to keep the book set when and where he set it and avoid the mistake some people make, which is to use the book to project into our future, to use it as a source for the same imaginative leap Orwell made.

“That wasn’t of any interest to me because I feel that there’s something about him trying to guess our age, in a broader sense, which make his near-misses actually more revealing about our society.

“For example, in 1984 people punch numbers and copies of The Times come flying down a tube – that’s a very rough version of the internet. But what it is exactly is him knowing that, ultimately, knowledge will need to be at our fingertips.

“We don’t have anything exactly like the tele-screen, where everyone has a piece of equipment in their room that can both transmit and receive at the same time, but I can communicate with my wife in Australia via the webcam on our laptops.

“Again, to live in a world where capitalism is still God, despite what has been happening to the world’s economies, and then to read a book where capitalism has been eliminated, makes you think much more about the world we live in.

“The book is only called 1984 because he finished it in 1948 and just switched the final two digits. The texture of it and what you can almost smell throughout the book is post-war London.

“Everything seems to be a bomb-site, there are poor people without shoes and rats running everywhere.

“It all feels like a dying empire covered in dust and that was fascinating to me.

“The fact that there have been other versions of it, such as the film with John Hurt, does give you pause but only so that you can think ‘what can we do with this material that maybe no-one else has been allowed to or has thought of?’. Of course, he was subject to censorship at the time and, when, for instance, Julia speaks about The Party using the most shocking words, he can’t use them, whereas I can because I have to turn that into dialogue.

“We can also turn the sexuality and nudity of the book into almost a dance vocabulary. What happens in this book is that two people fall in love and they use their lust and sexual appetite as a tool of rebellion. Then they get caught and tortured for it.

“To actually make that sexual rebellion live and breathe is another angle we can really run with,” he believes.

“I get excited by extremes. Not in order to shock people but just because drama is about condensed or distilled moments of life and they tend to explode in an extreme fashion, whether that be lust or grief or anger.”
 
1984 is at the Royal Exchange until March 27, 2010.