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Review: Doubling Down on Doublespeak in ’1984’

But within his nondescript exterior lurks the heart of a maverick, alert to the evils of a surveillance state where even thinking subversively is a crime. The book painstakingly establishes the grim, color-stripped reality of Winston’s everyday world (which isn’t all that different from the bombed-out, rations-ruled postwar London that Orwell knew), and then follows him in his hopeful, hopeless acts of dissidence with his secret lover, Julia (played here by Olivia Wilde).

Mr. Icke and Mr. Macmillan’s version seems to assume that we’re already acquainted with the political and domestic particulars of life in Oceania, and Orwell’s much-recycled vocabulary, which includes terms like “doublethink,” “Newspeak,” “thoughtcrime” and of course “Big Brother.” The production dispenses with conventional time-and-place-establishing anchors, and part of the play, maybe even all of it, occurs not in 1984 (all dates are suspect, anyway) but in some hazy future.

We segue from Winston’s first writing down his inchoately rebellious thoughts to a group of latter-day readers debating his diary’s origins and meanings. (The play’s creators have said that this time frame was inspired by Orwell’s often overlooked appendix to “1984,” a retrospective discussion of the language of Newspeak, which suggests that a less oppressive civilization existed after Oceania.)

Then we’re back in the medias res of Winston’s existence, where at first he blends in with the faceless throngs. Sort of. Mr. Sturridge, a fine actor who was nominated for a Tony Award for his highly kinetic performance in the revival of Lyle Kessler’s “Orphans,” is not ever someone who blends in.

Photo

Tom Sturridge and Olivia Wilde, sitting before Reed Birney.

Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

He portrays Winston as a wounded bird from the get-go, fragile and teetering on the edge of breakdown. His shorn-sided haircut and stricken expression mark him as someone Big Brother would surely have put out of circulation already. This feeble creature also keeps hearing a voice (audible to us, too), asking, “Winston, do you know where you are?”

Excellent question. For its Broadway incarnation, “1984” has been transplanted from what was once London to, apparently, what was once New York, where even British actors speak with American accents. Chloe Lamford’s central set — lighted to chill by Natasha Chivers, with nerve-shredding sound effects by Tom Gibbons — is much the same as when I saw it in London.

Thus we find ourselves in a drab room with a sliding window panel and tired furniture evoking bureaucratic interiors of the mid-20th century. The performers we have previously met as our book group of the future return in early-21st-century street clothes as Winston’s colleagues, a bland and hearty group who nonetheless foster an atmosphere of sustained paranoia.

The technology is of today and tomorrow. Winston plies his trade at the Ministry of Truth, with the aid of an Alexa-like voice and outsize computer graphics. Projected images of enemies of the state are deployed to muster the ministry employees into a Pavlovian rage in “two-minute hate” sessions. (Tim Reid is the video designer.)

So once again, do we know where we are? Why, yes, we’re in that post-postmodern landscape, so fashionable in theater today (it is a framework used, most effectively, in Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2”), where anachronisms meet and merge into a universal whole. Those last-century walls come tumbling down eventually, anyway, to reveal the sci-fi palace of horrors in which renegades like Winston meet gruesome fates.

Before that, the play telegraphically covers most of the plot points leading to that ghastly reckoning, though not in ways that particularly bring to mind the America of today. We see Winston’s discovery of a beautiful fellow traveler at his workplace (a feral Ms. Wilde, in her Broadway debut), and watch their subsequent blissful liaisons in a secret trysting place (shown in simultaneous videocast); and the pair’s recruitment into a resistance movement by a bureaucrat named O’Brien (a creepily avuncular Reed Birney, who here unnervingly resembles Dick Cheney).

Then again, is what we’re seeing really happening, or is it merely Winston’s deluded version of it? Confusion is further fed by the poor guy’s habit of speaking his thoughts out loud (during a mid-“hate” session, he screams, “Down with Big Brother!”), though it appears that only we, the audience, can hear them.

There is an ordering intelligence behind this ostensible muddle. I’m referring to Mr. Icke and Mr. Macmillan, not Big Brother. The show’s self-sabotaging ambiguity is meant to make us question every version of reality that’s on offer — and the last scene throws in another one that makes you doubt the entire narrative framework. That nebulousness is the play’s most ingenious aspect, and also its most irritating.

Though I usually don’t provide trigger warnings in my reviews, I feel obliged to do so here. The interrogations that Winston undergoes in the play’s second half are graphic enough to verge on torture porn.

Surely these episodes, at least, really happened to poor Winston and have a cautionary point. Otherwise, this deliberately disorienting “1984” would seem to be trafficking in the same kind of titillating violence with which Big Brother keeps his populace both cowed and entertained.

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