1984 - A Visceral Reimagining for a Watchful Age

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https://riversideparramatta.com.au/whats-on/1984-shake-and-stir/

Date Reviewed: 25/07/2025

If George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a cornerstone of our cultural consciousness, then Shake & Stir’s electrifying stage adaptation at Riverside Theatres lifts it from the page and breathes into it a living, shuddering presence. 

Opening night saw an eclectic crowd of high-school students, no doubt trying to understand the text ahead of HSC tests, to 20-somethings who claimed to love dystopic fiction, to the older audience members who knew better than to think this story was simply fiction, all drawn together beneath the looming shadow of Big Brother. As the house lights dimmed and the two minutes’ hate swept over us like a storm, performed by the entire cast directed at the audience, I knew we were in for more than a retelling. We were in for a reckoning.

From the outset, what struck me most was how this production made the familiar strange again. The set, dominated by towering telescreens, was nothing short of brilliant. They flickered with the slogans of INGSOC: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.” These words loomed, inscribed in our minds as much as on the wall. The screens watched with unblinking eyes, and, most impressively, became a canvas for Winston’s inner life. When Winston’s most subversive thoughts and fragile hopes danced as digital ghosts across Party propaganda, the effect was haunting: Big Brother wasn’t just watching Smith, he was watching us all, implicating the audience in the paranoia and dread. The multimedia was no mere decorative flourish: it was a chilling, integral force that amplified Orwell’s warnings for a new age. The screens’ omnipresence, paired with the stark, unforgiving set, kept us teetering between immersion and discomfort.

With only five cast members, the ensemble conjured a world, tight with claustrophobia and overbearing surveillance, that bristled with tension from first breath to last gasp. Each performer shifted roles with such confidence and depth that the small company somehow filled the stage with a cast of seeming dozens. Stevens Rooke’s performance as Parsons was, unexpectedly, a revelation. The novel’s Parsons has always felt like a footnote, but here, he lent the story its bruised humanity. Watching his arrest and subsequent torment in Room 101 made my skin crawl. It was this moment that pressed home the suffocating tragedy at the heart of the play. That said, Winston’s portrayal of love for Julia hovered, perhaps a little too brightly, over his hatred for the Party, muddying the tangle of love and hate Orwell strived to convey. But even this was just a quibble, and one that didn’t dampen my immersion.

It was Winston’s sequence in Room 101 that lingers most. O’Brien’s depiction of torture was haunting, a drawn-out ordeal that exposed not only physical pain but also emotional and psychological unravelling. His ruthless administration of electric shocks and, finally, the visceral staging of Winston’s confrontation with the rats, provided a gut-wrenching intensity which may be skimmed over in the novel. Where Orwell’s prose can feel remote, this staging makes the terror immediate, the consequences inescapable.

Shake & Stir’s production resonates in a world where boundaries between truth and fiction, surveillance and privacy, feel ever more blurred. The parallels are unmissable, even if left unsaid. As I left the theatre, INGSOC slogans still echoing in my mind, I couldn’t shake the sensation that the endurance of 1984 lies in its warning, but this production offers more: a haunting invitation to ask, as Orwell did, where we are, and where we’re heading next.

Reviewed by Olivia Langton