Theatre Review: George Orwell’s 1984 presented by the Blind Summit Theatre and Battersea Arts Centre
That you could turn 1984 into a seriously comic story is one surprising aspect of the Blind Summit Theatre’s premiere production of the Orwell classic. That you could play Charrington and Goldestein with puppets and make that make glorious sense is another. And when you add quite the oddest, but possibly most effective, sex scene you’re likely to see on stage in many a year into the mix, then this is a production that delivers the unexpected.
That it also delivers a polished, entertaining, gripping evening is a tribute to director Mark Down, puppet designer Nick Barnes and a fine acting team.
There have been many attempts to stage and film 1984, and few have been successful. Really, this is a book about what goes on in Winston Smith’s head – and that’s not easy to put on the stage.
The challenge is centrally overcome here by the use of a chorus – which sets the scene and carries the stories, and the thoughts, along. It marches for Hate Day, it dances obediently to Big Brother’s tune, it sings patriotic songs, it is the puppet-master – and it never leaves the stage. Even when Julia goes to light a gas flame in Winston’s “secret” room, the “flames” are the dancing fingers of a chorus member. And then there’s that sex scene – Winston and Julia’s first meeting in his “golden country” – in which the chorus manipulates their bodies. It sounds weird, but in fact it is an effective metaphor for the whole story unfolding before us.
Added to that central frame provided by the chorus are some fine, sophisticated conceits. This is – an old trope but in this case an effective one – a production within a production. We meet the cast on the bus on the way to the BAC, and they explain the staging, and announce each scene.
And there’s also a “staging” of Emmanuel Goldenstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by means of moving comic book – playing wittily off the current trend towards “comic book” versions of philosophical and political foundational texts.
The puppetry too is entirely self-conscious and upfront. A cardboard thrush is an odd conceit, so to a Goldenstein of head and hands that pops over a screen, yet both are curiously effective and affecting. And the spookily human-and-yet-not-human movement of Charrington, the junk shop owner who rents Winston a room, is something that will linger in my mind.
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Theatre Review: Frida Kahlo, Viva La Vida at the Oval Theatre, South London
by Natalie Bennett
Frida Kahlo was a wild, tempestous, brilliant woman whose art is truly mindblowing. Whilst I wouldn’t apply quite such strong adjectives to Frida Kahlo, Viva La Vida, Gael Le Cornec’s performance of Robert Robles play, which is based on fragments from the artist’s biography, letters, extracts from her diary and interviews, it captures enough of this explosive personality to make a gripping evening of theatre.
Le Cornec takes her character through the Day of the Dead, conjuring from scraps of cloth, from paper mache skulls and beloved objects characters from her past – above all her husband Diego Rivera — their dysfunctional relationship portrayed here with painful clarity — but also Breton, Trotsky and Rockefeller. Also stunningly portrayed are her love-hate relationships with Paris and New York, and her powerful drug addictions.
Le Cornec throws herself into the part. One second of self-doubt and this would dissolve into histrionics, but there isn’t one: whether she’s conducting an angry one-woman food fight with the soul of her dreadfully faithless dead husband, or cradling one of her unborn babes made from the fold of a scarf. She is a woman at war with her body, as her body is at war with her: scarred by horrific accident, wracked by drug addiction, struggling to hold herself together with the help of a torturing brace.
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From the editor, Natalie Bennett: I've lived in London for seven years, and I still love every minute of it. With the theatres, the museums and galleries, the streets dripping with history, there's so much here that many visitors miss. On this site I and a few friends share our enthusiasms, and provide tips of getting the most out of visiting, or living, here. 