It wouldn’t be the US if we couldn’t find one more way to squeeze a few more dollars out of a fad. Yep the latest 15 minute resurgence of Orwell’s ‘1984’ is coming to Broadway. I hope it does well because who knows maybe they’ll make a movie of Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ – PB/TK (smh!)
George Orwell’s 1984 Is Headed to Broadway but Not Because Dystopia Is Relevant or Anything – By David Canfield
As sales of George Orwell’s seminal 1984 have skyrocketed, Broadway is looking to cash in on Americans’ sudden, mysterious demand for plausible dystopian fiction. According to the Guardian, the original West End production of 1984 is headed stateside, expected to make its debut on the Great White Way in June. In 2014, when the play first premiered, director Robert Icke told the Guardian it was “particularly current” for the era of Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. Now, he and co-director Duncan Macmillan say that it is “horrifyingly relevant.”
The structure of the play veers away from the novel in one critical respect: It’s framed around the discussions between members of a book club in 2050, analyzing the diary entries of the original story’s protagonist, Winston Smith, and meditating on the underlying ideas and questions behind the text. Reviews of the West End production found the approach fascinating. The Guardian wrote that “[in] raising serious questions, Icke and Macmillan distill Orwell’s core dystopian narrative with great skill,” arguing that the postmodern framing was successfully provocative. According to the Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, “This production … allows us to viscerally experience the brutality of such a regime”—which, depending on where we are by the time June rolls around, might just mean rubbing salt in the wound.
Continue to slate.com article: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/02/03/the_london_production_of_george_orwell_s_1984_is_headed_to_broadway.html
