“1984” at Hackney Town Hall
Jeremy Malies in east London
22 October 2024
The ushers at Hackney Town Hall won’t let us in despite the rain. While being firm on this, they are in no way unpleasant. I start thinking out loud among the cluster of people on the steps of the building and ask if we’re already in an uncomfortable dystopia and this is part of the immersion. “No”, says a regular here. “You’re in Hackney!”
Photo credit: Maggie Jupe.
Hackney becomes a thrilling embodiment of Oceania in a wonderful adaptation of the novel by Jack Reardon for the company Pure Expression. Read the book, actually pick it up and read it, as opposed to the (excellent) John Hurt film or even the fine audio adaptation of this year. Within a few pages, a fundamental fact becomes clear. The whole story is set in London. Winston goes for walks through King’s Cross and uses Paddington for his countryside tryst with Julia, a station I’ve just come through.
Among the first to sit on benches in the vast atrium, I’m deafened for a moment by a long-haul plane hurtling towards Heathrow. Of course! I’m in Airstrip One and that’s a bomber on its way to Eastasia. Or is it Eurasia? Who are we at war with? Big Brother has got to me already! Site-specific theatre of this kind acquires momentum before the actors have even begun. It’s the dramatic equivalent of footballers letting the ball do the work.
The cast mingle with us. A thought criminal engages with me in a matey manner. At first I think he might be O’Brien (he’s sufficiently intimidating but also conspiratorial) and he tempts me into indiscretions. Thought crime will always out here. I’m taking notes and he warns me against keeping a diary. True off-the-cuff wit from the actor right there. But my new friend is soon (another great use of what is already available) put in a glass-panelled lift and sent up several storeys. We meet him later on a landing, by now a babbling husk of a man whose body is shades of black and blue. It’s all quite nerve-wracking and I could do with a tot of the famed Victory gin to get me through this. There has been violence early on, but the main torture scene is not overdone, and you feel it has been earnt by diligent build-up.
Video design by Dan Light is 100-foot high against a wall of the courtyard and we see ourselves on live video feeds. It’s a reminder to follow the party line. There is nothing mannered or Ivo van Hove-ish about this. If any theatre project should allow the video designer free rein, then it’s 1984.
Winston (Joe Anderson) is glamorous for 39 and Julia (Neetika Knight) is seductive. It’s like watching another set of doomed lovers in the many stage adaptations of Brief Encounter. You know how it will end but crave a different outcome. Reardon knows exactly which bits of dialogue to fillet from the text and of course introduces his own with great facility. I have to swallow hard as the lovers, snatching a few moments of bliss in the Golden Country, thrill to a thrush (sound design by Munotida Chinyanga) pouring forth its torrent of song. Earlier, Light’s video design (just about all the main action is also shown in projection) has zoomed in on and slow-motioned Julia handing over her note. This helps us to be in on the conspiracy. But have our handlers spotted what the pair are doing? Much of Chinyanga’s sound is still with me, including strident childish voices pleading to be allowed to watch a hanging.
A thrust of the adaptation is that O’Brien (a seemingly avuncular but menacing Dominic Carter) has created an assessment centre and we, the audience, are being evaluated as potential Inner Party members. A plucky (perhaps defiant) audience member later steps up to perform an execution with a pistol. Clearly destined to be a Party mandarin.
Unless he was going to be tricksy with form, something that his austere outlook would never have allowed, Orwell could only write the novel from Winston’s perspective. Reardon (like Sandra Newman in her recent novel Julia) can see things from other viewpoints and we learn about Julia’s hostel. We get inside the heads of everybody, particularly O’Brien, as he escorts us upstairs to the council chamber and prepares us for the initiation tests.
Now things are truly scary. I’m reminded of the footage of a similar-looking chamber in which Saddam Hussein forced one half of his cabinet to murder the other half. Not even Hitler thought of that. Carter is super-chummy, but you know he would torture you and your whole family to death if this offered him even a scintilla of pleasure. His baiting of Winston is intriguing. “I enjoy talking to you. Your mind resembles my own, except that you are insane!”
Any minor criticisms? A pair of Joan Baez-ish guitarists and vocalists start things off with ballads. They are tuneful and charismatic. Why? Shouldn’t we be subjected to the doggerel piece sung by the Prole woman made up by the Music Department of Oceania? Shouldn’t the dire nature of all this be unremitting? And we see nothing of the Proles who, it’s stressed many times in the text, are the only source of hope. Their absence makes for an especially grim dystopia. I was also puzzled by the repeated use of the security announcements we all hear on the underground. London Transport are only trying to protect travellers against bombs and pickpockets. Isn’t this punching down? It isn’t surveillance.
Reardon is skilful in getting round the fact that he can’t use a narrator’s voice. Winston enjoys the first mouthful of illicit premium chocolate given to him by Julia but then throws it away. You can see Anderson’s cogs whirring but he can’t explain what is going on. A little later we learn that as a child, Winston had stolen his sister’s chocolate ration, and the guilty memory haunts him. It’s acting of the highest order.
This is some of the best site-specific theatre I have seen since Punchdrunk’s major projects in the form. Reardon brings the text bang-up-to-date not just with the telescreens envisaged by Orwell, and not with what might be lazy and vague allusions to artificial intelligence. We are shown how the Party is using deep learning analysis to snoop on people. O’Brien tells us that our conversations can be analysed beyond word choice and right down to tone of voice. Of course I fail my assessment to be an Inner Party member and trot out onto Mare Street somewhat relieved.
Bucketloads of 1984 for me and the team this year. I’ve seen a disappointing version at Edinburgh and visited the island of Jura where Orwell finished the text for the seventy-fifth anniversary of publication celebrations. A colleague has reviewed the Theatre Royal Bath production which I will also see on tour. The ingenuity shown by the whole creative company and cast in this adaptation means I’m still interested and still want more. Barely a wasted or even slack moment here set off by much stagecraft and insight. Double-plus-good. If the Newspeak dictionary allowed me a further superlative I’d use it.
