In this centenary year, numerous events will attempt to wring their points out of the great disaster of the Great War. Often, the pathos lurks in the detail, not the tub-thumping. Gill’s expertise in Versailles is the portrayal of male suffering in a gesture or omission. Josh O’Connor excels here as Hugh Skidmore, the war-torn suitor of Leonard’s flighty sister, his face fixed in a petrified smile, anticipating rejection and stuttering excuses for his inability to talk about the conflict. His is a fine study in unacknowledged trauma—the emotional heart of the story. Unlike the main thesis, it rings completely true.
If Versailles feels like a descendant of the “well-made play”, its emotional power hidden, Rattigan-like, under the ostensible themes of war and high politics, 1984 at London’s Almeida might be placed in a time capsule as an example of the tastes and interpretations of political drama in 2014.
Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan have adapted Orwell’s well-trodden dystopia, melding his Newspeak glossary into the dialogue—pretty smoothly, it should be said. The programme is festooned with leading quotes which suggest that what Orwell was predicting was something bad happening to Edward Snowden. Telling audiences that their pet worries are dead ringers for Orwell’s is an old trick, but one which grates. Winston Smith’s problem was not the nicety of how much meta-data democracies should hold, nor a vague concern that too many people can get hold of your records through Google algorithms.
Hysteria of the wrong kind throughout the play undermines the attempt to make Winston (Mark Arends) into more than the sum of all fears. Something else bothered me. Orwell wrote his novel in 1948 and turned Britain into Airstrip One, a province of Oceania. Without this sense of Englishness under the heel of Big Brother, nothing makes much emotional sense.
Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan have adapted Orwell’s well-trodden dystopia, melding his Newspeak glossary into the dialogue—pretty smoothly, it should be said. The programme is festooned with leading quotes which suggest that what Orwell was predicting was something bad happening to Edward Snowden. Telling audiences that their pet worries are dead ringers for Orwell’s is an old trick, but one which grates. Winston Smith’s problem was not the nicety of how much meta-data democracies should hold, nor a vague concern that too many people can get hold of your records through Google algorithms.
Hysteria of the wrong kind throughout the play undermines the attempt to make Winston (Mark Arends) into more than the sum of all fears. Something else bothered me. Orwell wrote his novel in 1948 and turned Britain into Airstrip One, a province of Oceania. Without this sense of Englishness under the heel of Big Brother, nothing makes much emotional sense.
Technically this is the kind of production the Almeida under Rupert Goold does very well, an offspring of the (far-superior) Chimerica, and similar use of computer-generated images alternating with a pared-back set. But an overall chilliness undermines the sense that the doomed lovers are having more than a casual fling.
In such matters, the fundamental things apply, as Sam so rightly said of another ill-fated duo. Unfortunately it was hard to care whether Julia (Hara Yannas) betrayed Winston or the other way round, or whether the system, as Winston’s tormentor points out in Room 101, is simply designed to make sure that they both do.
The production is transferring shortly to the West End, proof that a lot of critics liked it far better than I did. Either go and tell me that I am wrong, or save yourself the trouble and re-read the original. George nailed it first time round, without the strobe lighting.
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