Review: 1984 at the Liverpool Playhouse ***1/2

George Orwell’s dystopian masterwork is 75 years old now, but its author didn’t live to see its impact, dying just a few months after its publication in the summer of 1949.

It’s an interesting exercise then to muse on how he may have reacted to events that followed – the death of Stalin, the oppression of a Stasi-infused East German state, the totalitarian regime and cult of personality in North Korea (probably still the closest match to 1984 itself)…to the widespread global use of CCTV and electronic surveillance. And what on earth would he have made of social media?

He may also have reflected on the incursions into freedom of expression closer to home where ‘thought' police have in recent times come knocking for the ‘non-crime’ of hurty words on the internet or, in perhaps the most egregious example to date, a pensioner who simply stopped to photograph a sticker in a public place.

Big Brother is watching you indeed. And it’s not the big brother who would stand up to your bullies at school, but the one who would give you a Chinese burn and dob you in to your parents for something trivial.

In essence, while the world changes, Orwell’s 1984 remains ever relevant. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

It also remains a favourite set text, hence the large number of young people among the Playhouse audience for this touring production from Theatre Royal Bath.

Above and top: Mark Quartley as Winston and Eleanor Wyld as Julia in 1984. Photos by Simon Annand.

A decade ago the Playhouse hosted Headlong/Duncan Macmillan’s intriguing modern take on the tale.

Here, Orwell’s source story is adapted semi-faithfully by Ryan Craig (albeit the bookseller Charrington is exorcised all together, while Craig adds imagined meat to the bones of Winston’s backstory for example – but then in a world where controlling memory controls reality, who can really say what is true and what is not?) and directed in clear and serviceably straightforward fashion by Lindsay Posner.

Mark Quartley gives every ounce of himself as Winston, investing him with a mixture of nervous bemusement and bright-eyed idealistic fervour as he progresses from jaded middle-grade Ministry of Truth employee to righteous and reckless revolutionary.

He’s aided and abetted by Eleanor Wyld’s similarly disillusioned Julia, Wyld proving a glowing, free-spirited Bonnie to his earnest Clyde, while Keith Allen brings a sinister Belial-like tone to O’Brien who in Charrington’s absence stands as the lone establishment figure.

Keith Allen as O'Brien in 1984. Photo by Simon Annand.

Allen also oversees a prolonged and believably savage torture scene after the interval, with Quartley’s spasming under progressively brutal electric shocks in gruesomely realistic fashion before we’re plunged into the pitch dark of Room 101 where all our worst fears reside.

Until then Winston’s resilience, his determined fingertip grip on humanity, is founded – in his own words - on ‘love’. But while Quartley and Wyld throw themselves into the physical side of things, you never really get a sense of real frisson between them.

Their Winston and Julia appear bound together more by a sort of febrile desperation for connection than uncontrollable passion or deep emotional attachment.

It means when he finally breaks with the words ‘do it to Julia!’ they lack the visceral shock value they might perhaps have had.

There is warmth however from David Birrell as Winston’s cheerful but naïve neighbour Parsons, whose denouncement shows that no one is safe, wherever they are and however total their faithful devotion to the party might be.

Watching over all (including the audience) from designer Justin Nadella’s eye-shaped giant screen, is the omnipresent Big Brother, the 'deity' himself played by Nick Woodeson complete, lest we forget Orwell's original inspiration, with a luxuriant Stalin-style moustache.