------------------------------------------
1984 by Blind Summit @ BAC
16th December 2009
Kathryn Johnson
‘…Here comes a candle to light you to bed…
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head’
A witty, energetic, fun….1984? This dramatisation of George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel by Blind Summit disrupts and exceeds expectations. Using an inventive mix of physical theatre and puppetry, the seven actors present life under Big Brother’s eye from a savage yet blackly humorous angle. Even those who did not feel “in a 1984 kind of mood” at the outset (to quote the friend I dragged along), found themselves drawn in and entertained.
The story of the doomed couple Winston and Julia, whose love affair is an act of rebellion against a regime that denies all forms of emotional expression, is framed at the outset as the salutary tale of “the thought criminal and his whore” delivered by a group of brainwashed Party members. This device allows for dramatic shifts in perspective which keep the audience on their toes; at one moment carefully distanced from the human tragedy at the centre of the story, at the next brought painfully close to it.
The actors are sharp and accurate in their movements and particularly impressive when acting as a one to evoke a roomful of brainwashed typists, a riled up crowd at a political rally, or the stoic passengers on a rickety bus. Yet they also deliver individually sophisticated and emotional performances, which rescue the play from becoming too mannered or cold. Julia Innocenti and Simon Scardifield were touching, sexy and convincing as Julia and Winston, and Josie Daxter was also very good as the shrewish and fanatical neighbour Parsons. If there was a weak point, it was perhaps Gergo Danka’s hammed-up performance as the Party member and torturer O’Brien. Where the seductive persuasiveness as well as the brutality of the fictional character sends a chill down the spine, this kind of subtlety was lost as Danka staggered about looking more drunk than dangerous. Yet elsewhere a difficult balance between emotional realism and stylisation was struck to powerful effect.
The production’s deceptively simple and homemade aesthetic was hugely engaging. Cardboard owls and thrushes inhabited the rural Golden Land, while signs reading Picture or Rusty Nails were held up in place of the objects themselves. A typically fast paced and comical debunking of the Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism was delivered by means of objects and labels over the top of a white sheet. This approach felt original and fresh; a kind of Brecht crossed with Blue Peter.
The two puppets representing the double-dealing shopkeeper Charrington, and a small child maimed by exploding bombs, were highly expressive and left me wanting more. Blind Summit rightly see puppetry as an apt medium through which to explore the horrifying divorce between power and reality in Orwell’s world of double speak and political manipulation. But while a hurried attempt was made to reflect on this during a scene in which Winston was forced to recognise and confront Charrington as a puppet, the relationship between medium and subject was otherwise left up to the audience to decipher. Several scenes in which actors manipulated each other physically and emotionally seemed to mimic and comment on the uneasy balance of control between puppeteer and puppet, but it was all a bit too obscure. The company’s decision not to include puppets in every scene is explained as an attempt to explode the medium and move beyond the use of actual marionettes, but this intriguing and potentially brilliant move did not come off with complete success – at least this time round.
1984 is Blind Summit’s first take on a single lengthy narrative after the success of their series of sketches Low Life. The sketch format is still perhaps their comfort zone; 1984 could have evolved in tone from light to dark more effectively and coherently than it did. It would have been worth the (very small) risk of alienating the audience in order to do justice to concentrated bleakness of the novel’s finale in the closing scenes. But this ambitious and impressive production should give Blind Summit the confidence and freedom to take those kind of risks, and I’m already excited to see where their experiments will lead.