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William Postlethwaite as John and Sophie Ward as Margaret Mond with Scott Karim as Helmholtz and Gruffudd Glyn as Bernard. Pictures: Manuel Harlan Brave New World
Wolverhampton Grand
**** WHEN I was a
lad Brave New World
and 1984
were regarded as essential reading, an exciting glimpse into a
disturbing, dystopian future. It was all fantasy of course, genetic
engineering was something done by Levi Strauss or Wrangler and we had a
welfare state not a nanny state, and certainly not a snooping Government
controlling our every action. How quickly the future catches up with us though.
We live in a world where designer babies are possible and test tube
babies a reality and where the Prime Minister announces funding for a
“happiness agenda” with the purpose of making people feel . . . happier. And making people feel happy is a key function of
Aldous Huxley’s controlled society where embryos are created by
carefully selected egg and sperm combinations, Alpha Plus with Alpha
Plus down to the moron Epsilons at the base of the social pile, all
designed for specific roles in a well ordered society. The embryos are
then grown in jars in a laboratory in vitro with each caste of embryo
given different controlled nutrients – like worker bees, drones and
queens but on an industrial scale. Into that world comes
the Savage who quotes Shakespeare – the title comes from a quote
in The Tempest
incidentally – a man who wants not only
freedom, but
Brave New World
might be a slim volume, just under 64,000 words, but it has challenging
concepts and ideas which are not easy to bring alive on stage so it is a
great credit to the Touring Consortium Theatre Company to translate book
to stage so well
Dawn King has kept the essence of the book in her
adaptation and director James Dacre keeps everything to the point as the
play opens with Thomas, The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning,
played by James Howard, welcoming us as the new intake.
We meet Henry, played by David Burnett, an Alpha
Plus, who knows his worth and embraces the hedonistic, immoral society
he lives in where everyone stuffs Soma tabs in their mouth like a child
with Smarties; Soma being a mind altering drug which induces well-being
without side effects, or at least not side effects that matter. Then there is the . . . lust interest,
Lenina, played by Olivia Morgan, attractive, blonde and like everyone
else, perfect and promiscuous, although promiscuity is as natural a
breathing in the new order. Not everyone is quite perfect though; Bernard,
played by Gruffudd Glyn, is a sleep learning specialist, who is a bit of
a misfit. He is smaller than other Alpha Plus males giving him an
inferiority complex and fermenting rumours that mistakes were made in
his embryo stages. His surly attitude worries Thomas who is set to banish him to an Island but puts that off when he leaves to visit a reservation to study savages taking Lenina with him. And that is where it all starts to unravel when
Bernard returns with not only a Savage, John, played by William
Postlethwaite but also John’s mother Linda, played by Abigail McKern,
along with a secret which sees the fall of the director and the rise in
stature, if not size, of Bernard as the keeper of the Shakespeare
quoting Savage. That brings him into contact with the regional controller, Margaret Mond, played by Sophie Ward, a change from the book’s Mustapha Mond, His Fordship. She has her own guilty secrets, owning banned books, and seems to have more than a scientific interest in John, the play and book’s anti-hero.
John’s struggle in his being what to us is a
normal(ish) person trying to cope with an alien controlled world is
quite disturbing and his grief is strangely moving as his alcoholic
mother is euthanized in such a matter of fact way in a world where death
is normal and organised for everyone at the end of their economic
usefulness - deemed to be 60 in Huxley's world.. With no family or emotional ties, no children or
parents, different casual partners every day, it is a world where no one loves,
misses or mourns anyone – so no one knows how to cope with John. John has one ally in the underground writer and
poet Helmholtz, a lecturer in the College of Emotional Engineering, who
reads a poem to students and is banned as a heretic. And John affects others with Postlethwaite and
Morgan producing a believable and tragic love scene with Lenina actually
feeling emotion. There is never going to be a happy ending, at
least not in John’s world, but in a clever theatrical twist, in this
Brave New World adaptatio we end where we began, as the new intake of workers
being welcomed by the new director, Henry. It is a clever setting from designer Naomi Dawson,
well lit by Colin Grenfell and with 12 video screens and a video wall
with a stream of images enhancing the action designed by Keith Skretch –
a case of using video with purpose rather than merely to add a bit of AV
and save on scenery. There is also futuristic music from These New
Puritans which sets moods or creates tension along with the lighting in
what is a
disturbing, intriguing and memorable production. To 07-11-15 Roger Clarke
03-11-15
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the
right to be miserable as well as happy.