This UK production, by Headlong along with Nottingham Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre, was presented at the 2015 Melbourne Festival, and such was its reception that it’s now touring Australia with a local cast – whose British accents seem so natural I double-checked this fact. A much more sinister uncertainty about reality is at the heart of this stage adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, which is as relevant as ever in this age of “alternative facts”, fake news and mass surveillance.

In an adaptable set reminiscent of Thatcher’s Britain, with its tired looking wood panelling and utilitarian furniture, 1984 opens with the protagonist, Winston writing in a journal. Grainy live video of his scribbling appears on a large screen permanently above the set, making his world’s oppressive surveillance powerfully apparent. This screen is frequently used to represent the totalitarian state’s all-seeing eye, which even peers into the room off-stage where his supposedly secret trysts with fellow rebel, Julia, occur. It’s also the mouthpiece for propaganda.

^{1984. Photos © Shane Reid}

Unlike the Winston of Orwell’s novel, whose fears and frustrations are mostly internalised “thought crimes,” he vocalises them in this play adapted...