Box Tale Soup’s 1984
A tiny cog in the huge grinding machine of state, subject 6079 Smith W has little power to change anything other than that which he is specifically directed to in his duties at the Ministry of Truth where he amends and updates the historical record to reflect the preferred narrative and lexicon, superfluous words simplified and complex ideas purged, his small act of rebellion a secret diary where he defiantly proclaims 2 + 2 = 4.
His neighbour’s children blank-faced echoes of the perpetual newsfeed, inured to the horrors they have been immersed in since birth, Winston is aware of the inconsistencies, conscious that the unquestionable continuity of Big Brother is in fact malleable, that regimented exercises and the requisite two minutes of hate are a distraction, but not so great a distraction as Julia, bold, confident and inexplicably eager to share his company.
Opening on the bright, cold day of April 4th, 1984, Box Tale Soup return with another of their unmistakable adaptations of the greats of British literature, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, operating as the trio of Mark Collier as the tragic Winston Smith alongside founders Antonia Christophers as Julia and Noel Byrne as the patriot O’Brien, his overtures of friendship indicating that he is a fellow mind sympathetic to the rumoured resistance.
The stage delineated with angular metal enclosures which move around the stage, changing form but always a cage in which the performers are imprisoned, unable to escape observation under harsh unshaded spotlights, at the back stands a pyramid illuminated from within by green light which towers over all until it opens to reveal the horrors of Room 101 while the soundtrack breathes the sonic despair of the industrial wasteland.
A warning from the middle of the last century of a terrible future which it was hoped might diminish in significance, it is a world where thought and word are policed, where policy dictates that subversion cannot exist if there is no language to allow the conversation to be had, where truth is the province of those who control the media and shout the loudest.
With rats in the walls and hiding in plain sight, 1984 is a world shifted to the alien but not unbelievably so, the mind uncomfortably recognising rather than rejecting it as preposterous, colder than the company’s previous productions with muted colours and practicality in the props, dynamically functional rather than decorative with no elegance beyond their inherent simplicity, even the characters ultimately reduced to puppets, sculpted and controlled.
Box Tale Soup’s 1984 runs at Above at the Pleasance Courtyard until Monday 25th August
