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).