This new adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 satirical novel about a future World State is both brilliant and unsatisfying. Futuristic settings are instantly credible – lab, nightclub, supersonic helicopter, Savage Reservation, “feelie” cinema, hospital, open field – thanks to the combination of Naomi Dawson’s designs (particularly vivid stroke: tree trunks encased in glass boxes) with Colin Grenfell’s lighting, George Dennis’s sound, Keith Skretch’s videos, and atmospheric music by “genre-shattering” band These New Puritans. Sight and sound create a visceral impact, palpably conveying the bright sterility of the World State where “everybody belongs to everybody”, family is abhorred, conformity is behaviourally programmed and happiness chemically achieved by daily drugs.
Writer Dawn King (acclaimed for Foxfinder, 2011, and Ciphers, 2013) effectively introduces the audience directly into Huxley’s dystopia. We are addressed from the stage as if we were new recruits being inducted into the London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre where embryos are genetically manipulated to produce socially appropriate adults – from Alpha intelligentsia to Epsilon drudges.
Bernard, a tetchy, self-consciously substandard Alpha (Gruffud Glyn), brings John the Savage (William Postlethwaite) back from the Reservation, where people still marry, have children and live in families. John’s feelings have been shaped by his reading of Shakespeare. The ensuing culture clashes between poetry and pragmatism (John’s argument with Sophie Ward’s world controller) and between love and sex (encounters with Olivia Morgan’s hatchery technician, Lenina) are interesting but emotionally unengaging. Consequently, John’s fate comes across as melodramatic and sensationalist, while the extended ending seems bathetic and banal. We understand the points being made but, in spite of fine performances, we don’t feel their impact. Still, if King’s dramaturgy frustrates, her dialogue is sharp and James Dacre’s production dazzles.
