Dear Sir: I don’t know who you are or anything about you except that you were sitting two seats away from me at a performance of “1984” at the Joyce Theater the other night and didn’t seem to be enjoying yourself very much. You squirmed a good deal and sighed several times during the first half and failed to return to your seat after the intermission, and I couldn’t help wondering whether your behavior might be a reflection of my own state of mind. I’ve no idea what motivated you to catch the Wilma Theater’s multimedia production of “1984.” Perhaps Orwell is a favorite author of yours. Perhaps you live in Chelsea and like to support its “little” theaters, or in Philadelphia, where the production originated. It may be that you were simply walking by the Joyce that night, in search of something to do; but you had the look of a man who knows his Orwell—in which case, I think I can guess at some of the things that distressed you about this production.
First, there was the multimedia paraphernalia with which the director, Jiri Zizka, tried to create an Orwellian world around us: the seven hexagonal screens at the back of the stage, the film clips, the slides, the public-address system, and the laserium-style lighting. It was all rather silly, wasn’t it—the films that were meant to tell us about Winston’s dreams, fantasies, and memories, and the footage of Winston and Julia making love; the words “RECTIFY BACK ISSUES” slapped on a screen in computer-style neon to tell us what Winston does at the Ministry of Truth; the projections of woody copse, cluttered room, and safety glass to locate us in forest, junk shop, and the Ministry of Love. Show-and-tell theater—as though we needed to have things illustrated in order to understand them.
What distinguishes the Ministry of Love from every other place of punishment or execution in history or letters is the fact that it is called the Ministry of Love. If you try to suggest it the place where Winston Smith is imprisoned, tortured, and brought into line with party orthodoxy by projecting an image of safety glass, you will only rob the Ministry of Love of its Orwellian aspect: it will become like any other prison. Yes, I imagine that the multimedia aspect of the production bothered you a lot.
Then there was the “dramatization” itself: actors dressed up like storm troopers rushing around and arresting each other, stammering “Not Room 101!”—well, I guess you missed that part. Still, you’d have caught all the heavy-handed exposition: Winston talking aloud to his diary (“If only Emmanuel Goldstein’s underground brotherhood really existed, then I could work for a just cause!”) or apostrophizing O’Brien (“I’m writing this diary for you!”). No doubt you also wondered why aspects of life under IngSoc that have been fixtures for as long as anyone can remember—Newspeak, for instance, and the Thought Police—seemed only just now to be coming into existence. (Why was Winston’s colleague at the Ministry of Truth having to explain the mechanics of Newspeak to him? Why was Winston remarking with an air of discovery that “the Thought Police do everything—rewrite history, invent characters who never existed”?)
And what, you must have asked yourself, was up with all those visual and aural allusions to contemporary American life: the office workers seated behind computer consoles, the televised aerobics classes, the Pac-Man images? They were Mr. Zizka’s big statement about how much our own culture and society have come to resemble the world of Orwell’s “1984”—a banality that this production requires far too much manpower and technology to arrive at. In addition to a set designer (Phillip Graneto), a lighting designer (James Leitner), and a costume and makeup designer (Pamela Keech), Mr. Zizka had—glance at your program, if you still have it—a scenic-projection designer (Jeffrey S. Brown), two sound designers (Adam Wernick and Charles Cohen), and a dramaturge/lyricist (Michael Ladenson), all to make a point that Orwell was able to make just with words.
Among the many distortions of Orwell in this production, the transposition of IngSoc and Airstrip One to present-day America was, I think you’ll agree, the most unfortunate—worse, even, than the sentimentalizing of Winston and Julia and their relationship. What is the point of using seventies lingo to tell us in 1987 that many of the predictions Orwell made in 1948 about what would happen in 1984 have come true? What made “1984” “prophetic” was not that Orwell guessed rightly that certain things would happen but his suggestion that they would come so soon. As far back as 1908, E.M. Forster had predicted a time when people would live isolated lives in front of tele-screens, communicating solely by electronic means. But Forster’s “The Machine Stops” was set in the far-off future—as were Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We,” the book that is thought to have inspired much in “1984,” and Robert Graves’s “Watch the North Wind Rise,” which appeared the same year as Orwell’s novel.
If anything set “1984” apart from the other dystopian novels of its time, surely it was that it took place in the foreseeable future, only a generation away: people who read the book when it first came out, grownups in their twenties and thirties, would have grown children in their twenties and thirties when 1984 rolled around. The first is your generation, the second mine, so you’d probably know better than I; but Orwell’s simple transposition of the last two digits of the year 1948 must have been very daring for its time, must have added a good deal to the book’s shock value and poignancy.
Orwell took certain icons of British culture—a well-known church, a children’s rhyme, an old man straight out of an Ealing Studios comedy—and, to a public still high on post-war optimism, posited a time when that church would be demolished, that rhyme forgotten, and that old man unable to recall anything of Ealing-comedy England. Gentlemen of England then abed must have looked up and said, “Good God! He’s talking about my lifetime! I’ll be alive then!” For Jiri Zizka to transform Orwell’s old man into a Nick Nolte-type bagman out of “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” is meaningless, as ineffective as just about everything else in the Wilma Theater production. But then, it was bound to be, for how can you dramatize a novel that culminates in the hero’s conversion to a position of moral solipsism?
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” “1984” isn’t really about churches and nursery rhymes; it’s about language and politics. Perhaps you hoped that the Wilma production would be worth seeing for the same reason I did: it’s Mr. Zizka and Michael Ladenson’s version (their “translation for the American stage”) of an adaptation of “1984” by the Czech playwright Pavel Kohout, whose own Orwellian experiences under the “normalization” policies of the post-Dubcek era were brought to the attention of Western intellectuals by an early Stoppard play. “Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth” is a play very much about language and politics. In it, a company of proscribed artists in a police state are rehearsing a “living room” version of “Macbeth.” They manage to best the authorities by performing the play in a nonsense language that the audience has learned in the first act. “Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth,” which had a brief run in New York in 1979, is dedicated to Mr. Kahout and is partly based on an incident in his life. Did you find it odd that none of these extremely interesting facts are mentioned in the Playbill for “1984”; that, indeed the program provides no information at all about the original playwright, and does not even include the conventional “bio.” As far as the American Theater Exchange is concerned, Mr. Kohout seems to be as much a nonperson here as he is in his native land.
Jiri Zizka’s “1984” is less interested in language or politics than it is in its own gimmickry. It uses technology to make the point that we live in an over-mechanized society but fails at using theater to express or explore any of Orwell’s major concerns—as the recent staging of “Hard Times” failed to explore those of Dickens. I don’t know why people have to keep churning out stage adaptations of the world’s great novels or why, when they do, the American Theater Exchange has to keep bringing them to New York. They give actors employment and critics a chance to enhance their summer reading, but otherwise seem to serve no useful function. I like to think you abandoned “1984” because you are getting tired of these infantilizing dramatizations. It may be, though, that I have misread your behavior entirely, that when you shifted irritably in your seat and muttered under your breath it was because you had a cramp, or a train to catch, or had just remembered that pan of milk on the stove; in which case, I’ll feel most foolish when you write to tell me so but will remain yours faithfully,
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, August 3, 1987