1984

This new, celebrated British adaptation of George Orwell’s prophetic novel is here impeccably recreated by an Australian cast.  The co-adaptors/directors Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan have forged an artful, compelling telling of Orwell’s authoritarian world of doublethink, where histories are erased and words stripped of meaning.

We see Winston beginning his illegal diary, reclaiming his truth, surrounded first by some futuristic tutorial group debating its origin.  Confusion continues at his workplace at the Ministry of Truth, in the grimy wood-panelled cafeteria, where Winston is lost in a scene remembered three times.

Tom Conroy is an appealing anxious lead and Ursula Mills spirited as his fellow rebel.  In an offstage closet, the lovers escape the seeing screens of Big Brother, but their illegal reading and love-making is expertly screened out to us – and, no doubt, to the regime.  

An ensemble cast including Paul Blackwell, Renato Musolino, Guy O’Grady, Yalin Ozucelik and Fiona Press play his fellow workers, spies and brainwashed citizens of 1984, their accents and characters all perfectly post-war Britain. 

Its precise storytelling is punctuated with a fast changing technology of lights (Natasha Chivers), sound (Tom Gibbons) and screens (Tim Reid), but such devices also keep us oddly alienated from knowing much about Winston and his love.  The acting too takes on that template of British aloofness which leaves us unengaged if impressed.

We are however grabbed by the throat when Chloe Lamford’s panelled set collapses and the sparse, TV studio-styled world of contemporary fascism is revealed in Room 101.   

Terence Crawford is masterly as the bespectacled, dangerously benign bureaucrat who tortures Winston into subservient Newspeak.  The violence is indeed horrific but worse is the sadness of Winston’s final political enfeeblement – and, arguably, of so many of us.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Shane Reid