1984 (Tour – Blackpool)

What a difference a year or so makes. Just 15 months ago Sell A Door Theatre Company’s production of 1984 pretty much crept into Blackpool Grand Theatre ahead of the summer season and promptly crept out again having ticked the necessary GCSE syllabus boxes but not made any waves.

Now 1984 is back at the same theatre at the end of an adventurous summer line-up, this time adapted by Headlong – and brings with it an Olivier Best New Play Nomination, a folder of rave reviews and has achieved that rare accolade of being a commercial success, following runs at Nottingham Playhouse, the Almeida Theatre and in the West End.

George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian masterpiece clearly lends itself to the stage and refuses to date. In fact a world of perpetual war where this week’s enemy is next week’s ally, government surveillance is taken for granted, brain washing and the daily destruction of language are de rigeur, could have been written today.

It’s largely that which makes Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s adaptation so magnetically powerful. They start where Orwell’s work finished – assuming that the ill-fated Winston Smith’s forbidden diary somehow survived him. How else are we able to read his story? And how else did the book’s less read but very important appendix – The Principles of Newspeak – come to exist at all?

Given that much of the current theatre audience previously thought Big Brother was only a TV reality show and probably felt that the dreaded Ministry of Love was a nightclub (the superstate Oceania isn’t that far removed from club brand Oceana after all), the adapters clearly work miracles to make this an accessible vehicle for all ages.

Alarmingly much of Orwell’s Newspeak (predicted to take over Oldspeak by 2050) is already with us – Doublethink and Inner Party for example – so no need for translations.

Winston (a believably sensitive and vulnerable performance by Matthew Spencer) is first seen observing a futuristic book club (hence the introduction of mobile phones) but he, like us, is left to wonder exactly where he is, who is he is and what exactly is happening. Scenes are replayed as almost carbon copies whilst he tries to work things out, overhead projection display what is happening outside what he believes to be his reality but what with frightening effect and deafening volume turns into the nightmarish Room 101.

Janine Harouni plays the "love" interest Julia with exactly the right combination of passion, enigma and cool detachment while Tim Dutton’s O’Brien delivers the didacts such as "the price of sanity is submission" and "the individual is dead, the party will always win" with a coldly convincing logic.

Natasha Chivers’ lighting adds to the shock factor as much as the set’s transformation and the liberal supply of "blood."

A must see!

1984 runs at the Blackpool Grand until 3 October