A production of George Orwell’s 1984 comes with its own set of questions. How do you perform a very political story without making a political play? Or rather, how does a production handle Orwell’s critiques of the totalitarian state without hammering (and sickling?) the audience over the head with them? Those problems are well-handled in the show currently playing at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theater Company.
From the moment the curtain opens to its stripped down set and oversized screen, the play is both televised and textual. It seeks to both depict the story and show the importance of the book itself — a difficult balance.
In the first half of the play, though, the performance stumbles as it tries to find its feet. At first it isn’t clear if we are supposed to be reading the story alongside a contemporary book club, or if the play is trying to liken the numerous telescreens of 1984 to the ringing phone that interrupts the group discussion. Behind the actors hangs an oversized screen running the length of the stage, but is this just a means of showing what sits on Winston’s table?
Over the course of the play, however, the production comes to focus less on making themes explicit and instead allows the text to speak for itself.
As the drama progresses, it brings Orwell’s dystopia to life with all of its quirks of time and truth. Rather than allowing the audience to sit comfortably certain of the good guys and the bad, this is a disorienting production, full of the hiss of electric wires, thunder, and blinding lights that flash like a nightclub. It’s not for the faint of heart (or the epileptic), but then again, neither is Orwell.
Through the onstage screen, the audience becomes Big Brother, peering into Winston’s life. It’s a shift of perspective, which, at the same time, shows the small details that might otherwise be lost in a stage production, like the words written on his diary page and the exact process by which someone is deleted. It also allows the actors to play with perspective, letting the audience see Winston’s arrest through the screen of Big Brother. In a world where the nature of reality shifts, the final uncertainty is not knowing whose side you’re on.
Thematically, this is true to Orwell’s vision. It’s mad, with the same days both occurring and changing. Even the two-minute hate is faithfully depicted, a scene that becomes even more powerful when witnessed rather than read. At the end of the play, these moments become even stronger.
The scene of Winston’s torture in Room 101 is so viscerally horrifying that when he screams “Do it to Julia!” it comes almost as a relief. It’s a moment where 2+2 does equal 5 and Matthew Spencer, playing Winston, doesn’t even need to profess his affection for Big Brother.
1984 is, in many senses, an allegory, a play about the fundamentals of human nature. What resonates as the actors read aloud the final scene is that the drama played out here will play out again and again.
1984 is playing at the Shakespeare Theatre Company until April 2.
