THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
‘Oh my god. I cannot think of anything worse,’ my colleague says to me as I detail part of my half term plans, to see Pure Expression’s new immersive adaptation of the seminal dystopian novel, 1984.
‘Why? People pay to be uncomfortable all the time in amusement parks and watching horror films,’ is my reply. And is what I expect. To be darkly trapped inside a seemingly inescapable world of constantly being monitored and scrutinized by The Thought Police, ready to analyze your every minute movement and perhaps to see a poignant narrative that has something to see about our own increasingly dystopian times.
I want to be enveloped in an Oceania that Terry Gilliam would have styled, full of smiling citizens, pleased by their own oppression and subjectification, with grins that present as stretching so wide that they cover, tent-like, a multitude of dark goings on and secrets about Oceania.
And Pure Expression could have very few better venues in which to install the fictionalized Ministry of Truth. Hackney Town Hall is somber and grandiose and we are ushered by ‘Ministry of Truth employees’ in plain navy boiler suits, in admonishing tones, to a cavernous antechamber which one would guess serves as a canteen during the day for the employees of the borough. For the occasion of this production, it had been lavishly transformed into a noirish glass-clinking cocktail hour in honor of the all powerful party, the savior of Oceania.
There was a short happy hour with a jazz band and some throaty, 1930s/40s style tunes before we were taken through to the main event and to be ‘assessed’ for our potential to work at the aforementioned ministry.
So far, so atmospheric.
And so it remained as we took the seats that the right honourable councillors of Hackney would take in sessions and looked on as we were lectured by the sinister O’Brien, played with verve, charisma and a commanding, unsettlingly welcoming geniality by Jude Akuwudike, about the importance of constant vigilance against the terrible sin against the state, thought crime.
Kudos to directors Jem Wall and Richard Hahlo for intelligent and creative use of an already historic feeling building to create some truly dystopian moments of existential horror, including what I think was the visual pinnacle, involving a glass elevator.
I think the modifier ‘immersive’ may be problematic.
Years ago – 11 to be exact – the Talawa Theatre company staged a play called The Serpent’s Tooth in Shoreditch Town Hall, a few miles north of 1984. Talawa did not brand what they were doing as immersive, but we were dragged through an utterly spellbinding, dark tale that had all the eye gouging one might expect from any story inspired by King Lear, including a prop that was supposed to be a disembodied eye rolling towards my and my fellow theatergoers feet. Through the story we could hear atmospheric screams from different parts of the basement rooms, convincing us without telling us of the dark things going on in other parts of this lawless England.
1984 was… fun. It was. But perhaps the best parts were the Ministry of Truth employees who give us a terrifying rendition of the Oceania national anthem at one point. My understanding of immersive having attended Punchdrunk’s first dud earlier this year, The Burnt City, is that the audience members have choice about how they experience the narrative. That we can roam in a perpetually moving world of the story that often feels boundless. This was involving and atmospheric, but not immersive. I also wondered why, in a tale so known for essentially being scrutinized via CCTV, cameras were underutilized and why we weren’t shown ourselves as we entered. We were made to feel a little complicit in Winston’s ordeal, but I was puzzled by writer Adam Taub’s decision to limit the tale to an hour and a quarter, circumscribing the company’s ability to really fill out the world of 1984, particularly for people who have never read the novel.
This is a fun play and deliciously dark, worth checking out just for the grandeur of the venue. But we as an audience either need to be given more agency and have more interaction with the characters around us or Pure Expression just need to brand this as a really good story, not as what is now becoming a trite label: ‘immersive.’
