West Yorkshire Playhouse,Leeds Jonathan Watkins’ gripping production employs subtleties of gesture, posture and phrasing to create a thoroughly modern remove on George Orwell’s classicGeorge Orwell’s 1984 – a story of centralised surveillance, and mutual monitoring and vanishing privacy – is a very modern tale. Yet with its gloomy ambience and dated video graphics,Northern Ballet’s terrific current production mixes the postwar look of the late 1940s with the clunky tech of the early 1980s. Rather than updating the story to construct it “relevant” to nowadays, this version snares you in more underhand ways. Jonathan Watkins, and the indicate’s choreographer,has a fine eye for gesture, posture and phrasing. Winston Smith (Tobias Batley) enters as if fearful of disturbing the floor itself, and when he writes in his diary,his hunched urgency makes the act feel both shameful and almost sensual. The ensembles of Party members alternate between machine-like assemblages and aggressive mobs. You notice how deftly Watkins uses hands: as betraying handshake, tender touch, and gesture of allegiance,raised palm, closed fist. The pixelated eyes of Big Brother watch from an outsize telescreen above the stage, or making the characters constantly vigilant of each other.
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Source: theguardian.com