Orwell To Broadway
A stage adaptation of 1984, George Orwell’s famous vision of a dystopian future, is heading to Broadway.
The production team behind Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will open the play on June 22 in NYC, reports Variety. It is based on Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s London production, which was a hit there in 2014.
Of the London run, the NYT wrote it was “willfully assaultive … Doublethink, a key notion in the Newspeak vocabulary that Orwell invented for 1984, spirals into quadruplethink and beyond.”
According to the paper it has already been staged in US theaters in California, Massachusetts, and Washington DC.
The story is being picked up widely, from the Rolling Stone to Paste.
New York Magazine says “Big Brother is arriving from overseas … from the land of Brexit to the land of Trump” and reports “it will arrive in New York with its London creative team intact, adding a new American cast of party members and proles.”
As we have noted, interest is booming for dystopian stories, which Paste recognizes in their headline, “1984 Comes to Broadway—With Excellent Timing.”
Below are samples from the London production: