Edward's Theatre Company, a youth theatre group from Lincolnshire that always likes to bring a challenging piece of theatre to the Fringe, has this year created its own adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, with a script by Helen Appleton and director Carole Ashcroft, and with elements of the production devised by the cast during rehearsals. There is also a strong 'physical theatre' element to the production, which was created in conjunction with advising practitioner Ceri Ashcroft.
Orwell's post-war novel created a society in which speaking against the government is punishable by death or torture, as had been seen in Nazi Germany only a few years earlier. However the control of people's thoughts and the intrusion into their private lives has become far more extensive than the Nazis ever dreamed of, using modern technologies and projections of where those technologies could go. The government also changes the history books and records to show that they are always right and 'purifies' the language to try to eradicate words that allow radical or revolutionary thoughts to be expressed. Although terms such as 'thought police', 'room 101' and especially 'Big Brother' have lost their impact through common usage for more trivial purposes (perhaps achieving the aims of 'Newspeak' in a different way) they are still frightening concepts in their original context. Of course many of Orwell's nightmare visions have been realised in some form in order to control how a population thinks, even in the so-called 'free world'.
The central character of Winston Smith is played by Andrew Chetwynd as a very ordinary, perhaps even a dull man who gets sucked into the resistance movement against Big Brother almost by accident. Opposite him, Aryan Ramkhalawon turns in another passionate performance as the girl he has an adulterous affair with, against the law. The rest of the thirteen-strong cast play multiple parts.
The physical theatre aspects of the play work very well, demonstrating strongly the repetitiveness and monotony of the lives of the faithful workers. It also gets over the problem of showing sex scenes and horrific torture scenes on stage with a teenage cast in a clever and visually interesting way without causing embarrassment or appearing to cop out. The adaptation gets across the spirit of Orwell's novel, although some of the dialogue is still in novel form; where in a novel we are sometimes just given one character's speech and left to imagine the responses, it seems odd in performance when a conversation is so one-sided.
The cast works very well together as an ensemble, which is essential for a piece in this style to work. The pace is a little slow in parts and the production seems just a bit too long, but overall Edward's has once again produced something entertaining and thought-provoking that can stand proudly alongside many of the professional productions on the Fringe.
(Originally awarded 3½ stars.)