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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
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The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
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Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Henry Hitchings's rating
Reader rating
Description: Trafalgar Studios' production celebrating George Orwell classics, featuring Dominic Cavendish's adaptation of Coming Up For Air and excerpts from Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Trains: Tube: Charing Cross, Embankment 
Phone: 0870060 6632
Website: www.theambassadors.com/trafalgarstudios
George Orwell’s writing lends itself to performance because of its fluent ease of expression, and in the intimate space of the Trafalgar Studios this homage highlights its mix of simple vividness and shrewd polemic.
The first half consists of theatre critic Dominic Cavendish’s skilful adaptation of material from Orwell’s novel Coming Up For Air, published 70 years ago this week.
In an enjoyably varied monologue George Bowling, an insurance salesman so weary of life that even tying a shoelace is a trial, recounts his decision to flee the festering “inner outer suburbs”. Fed up with the modern cult of “streamlining”, he craves a return to the Oxfordshire countryside of his childhood.
“One never does go back,” says Bowling but go back he does — to learn, inevitably, the folly of nostalgia. Hal Cruttenden delivers the monologue deftly, with a combination of camp levity, amused indignation and genuine ferocity.
In the second half three other pieces of Orwell’s prose become elegant playlets. Ben Porter, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a young Orwell, finds unexpected humour in the essay Shooting an Elephant. Alan Cox gives a closely observed performance of A Hanging. Then the two combine for a scene from Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which O’Brien (Cox, superb) hollows out the soul of Porter’s Winston Smith — a shocking exhibition of the cold sadism of authority.
Gene David Kirk’s restrained production affords Orwell’s writing the space it deserves, and, perhaps most remarkably, shows that the underrated Coming Up for Air contains the germ of the later, greater Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Until 4 July (020 7432 4220).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
I saw the production last night and personally I though the production was unreservedly brilliant. The first part, Coming Up for Air, was so enthralling, that when it was over, then only did we realize that a hour had passed by. Ditto with the acting of W Smith. O'Brien came off as rather weak, but on reflection, I was sub-consciously (and perhaps unfairly) comparing him to the Richard Burton film version.
In all an evening well spent. A must see for anyone interested in serious theatre.
- Ajit Prasad, London
