Chris Hannan on adapting Orwell's 1984 for the stage: 'We need to learn something from it'
With his new adaptation of 1984, playwright Chris Hannan hopes audiences will be able to gain a greater appreciation of democracy by ‘looking at its extermination’. Interview by Mark Fisher
Clydebank-born playwright Chris Hannan is a dab hand at adapting novels. He was the writer behind The Three Musketeers And The Princess of Spain, a festive hit at Edinburgh’s Traverse in 2010, and Crime And Punishment, named best production in the CATS awards of 2014. He has also adapted The Iliad and is working on a musical version of Great Expectations.
Despite all this, his latest adaptation gave him a new challenge. His previous treatments have been of books that had most likely been read by only a small section of the audience despite their familiar titles. That cannot be said of his latest collaboration with director Dominic Hill: a staging of George Orwell’s 1984.
At a recent event at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum, where the production will finish its four-city tour, Hannan asked the audience how many had read it. Nearly every hand in the room went up.
Even if you did not study it at school, as so many of us did, and even if you missed the John Hurt movie (released, appropriately, in 1984), you will recognise its language. Before 1984, there was no Big Brother, Room 101 or thoughtcrime.
More than that, it is a novel that seems to be a blueprint for our own intolerant age. Written as an alarm call about the dangers of totalitarianism, it tells the futuristic story of Winston Smith, a worker in the records department at the Ministry Of Truth, who lives in a world of perpetually warring superpowers and constant rewriting of history. When he dares to rebel, he faces a system that tells him 2 + 2 = 5. That sounds very like the fake news and factual manipulations of today.
As a result, when the show opens at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre at the end of this month, audiences will arrive with a firm set of expectations. The playwright has to take account of that. “It is a pressure for sure,” says Hannan, when we meet near the Citizens in a rehearsal break. “It’s one of these books that has gone beyond itself. It’s part of the currency of daily living.”
He has no desire to let audiences down, but he also wants to reanimate their appreciation of what made the book a classic in the first place. “The real danger for me would be people coming to see this story and saying, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s about Trump,’” he says. “They come knowing what they think it is about and they leave, having had that confirmed. There’s no real encounter in that transaction between the audience and the play. They’ve already decided what it’s about and that they agree with it.”
To shift our perspective, he has introduced a framing device. It felt appropriate that a Scottish production, one that also plays in Dundee and Aberdeen, should allude to the novel’s incubation on Jura, where Orwell spent several months of 1946 and 1947 while dealing with a bronchial complaint. By topping and tailing the play with Orwell himself, who was then hospitalised in East Kilbride, Hannan reminds us of the politics that shaped his thinking.
“When you look at why he wrote the thing, it all goes back to the Spanish civil war,” he says, explaining that when Orwell fought against Franco’s fascist forces in 1936, he was dismayed to find the communists turning against the anarchists when they were supposed to be on the same side. The novelist himself was targeted by the Soviet-sponsored communists for siding with the anarchists. Only by hiding did he escape assassination.
“He’s not writing about totalitarianism from the point of view of someone saying, ‘I researched Russia and here’s what I found out about it,’” says Hannan. “It is based on his brutal personal experience of the annihilation of truth and the liquidation of human beings. To give a framing story helps to broaden the discussion. I want people to be in conversation with this masterpiece. We need to learn something from it.”
He adds: “As an audience, we need to think about it not about how they’re lying but about all our approaches to the truth. Animal Farm and 1984 are really about democracy. There’s not really any point at looking at it in terms of totalitarianism, as such; you need to look at it in terms of what democracy needs. What can we learn about democracy from looking at its extermination?”
By a strange irony, Orwell’s consultant surgeon at Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride had fought on the fascist side in the Spanish civil war. It adds an extra layer of tension to the adaptation. “I’m worried the viewers will all go, ‘Hannan makes up a ludicrous story about a fascist doctor,’” he laughs. “In story terms it’s great because he has to put his trust in this guy and he has to have a conversation.”
Set in a steampunk world, half past, half future, Dominic Hill’s production stars Outlander actor Jack Tarlton as Winston Smith, with the CATS award-winning Jessica Hardwick as Julia, his sexually independent colleague and fellow dissident. In the transition from the book, where everything is seen from Winston’s point of view, to the stage, where there are multiple perspectives, Hannan is giving extra weight to their romantic relationship.
“You have to give Julia more of a presence and show the love story as what we’ve got to lose,” he says. “Adaptations of 1984 can focus on the externals – the cold, science-fiction world. Of course, that’s part of it, but we need to enter that through these characters that we’ve got an emotional connection with.”
As 1984 gets under way, Hannan is in the early stages of developing a musical version of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Keen to break the hegemony of Broadway-style songs, he sought out Rachita Arora, a Bollywood composer. With five songs written, they are hoping to entice producers with their cross-cultural fusion. “It’s set in London but with strong Indian connections,” he says. “Miss Havisham’s money comes from Empire, Magwitch’s money comes from India and Estella is adopted from India. I’m excited about it.”
1984 is at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, 29 August–26 September, and on tour until 7 November.
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