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What is there left to say about Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2026? By now, Orwell’s dystopian satire has been held as a mirror to everything from Trump to TikTok. But this co-production from a trio of Scotland’s leading theatres (Dundee Rep, Edinburgh’s Lyceum and Glasgow’s Citizen) is a new adaptation by Chris Hannan, and seeks to shine fresh light on one of our most overused modern-day shorthands.
It’s framed by speculative biography about Orwell’s tuberculosis treatment in a hospital near Glasgow, and it feels cheap, at first, to correlate Orwell and 1984’s Winston so simply. Both are played by Jack Tarlton with the same petulance and hacking cough. But Winston’s childlike naivety, and his monologues pleading for genuine conversation (which reverberate emptily; a literal echo chamber) eventually make for jarring contrast with Orwell’s frosty dialogues with his doctor, who fought opposite him as a fascist in the Spanish civil war.
Jumpsuited Thought Police patrol a towering set made of rusty scaffolding, amid blaring industrial noise and plunges into blackout darkness: the staging of totalitarian Oceania is as nightmarish as you’d expect. Directed by Dominic Hill, an eight-strong ensemble bring surrealism, physicality and flashes of warmth. Irene Macdougall is a fabulously unknowable O’Brien, and Jessica Hardwick brings grit and humour to Julia, Winston’s famously underwritten love interest, although the pair share barely a spark of chemistry.
Winston’s torture scenes, using the same hospital bed and nurses (now blood-stained), contrast hammily with Orwell’s bratty attitude towards his own medical treatment. It takes the sting out of these precisely choreographed violent acts, replete with the dreaded trip to Room 101, but the comparison pays off when Orwell and his doctor take a scalpel to their own opposing views about extremism, and even the baseline “facts” of medical science.
The implication is that, outside of Oceania, we are lucky to indulge in arguments at all: poor Winston couldn’t. But how far can agreeing to disagree take us? And is there not a real danger in fence sitting, when the stakes are so high? This is both a frustrating handling of Orwell’s classic, and a provocative reminder of the importance in saying: “I don’t agree.”
