1984 at Waterside

There are few novels as culturally embedded – or as casually invoked – as Orwell’s 1984. “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, “Room 101”: phrases that long ago escaped the page and entered the English language. But familiarity can blunt the blade. What happens when the story is rebuilt from the ground up?

At Waterside Arts, award-winning company Box Tale Soup offer a new adaptation that leans into the novel’s theatrical possibilities. Known for transforming the simplest materials into fully realised theatrical worlds, the company fuse puppetry, movement and original music into something handcrafted and meticulously choreographed. Here, their unique puppetry becomes a metaphor. Bodies manipulated, faces masked, identities fragmented – this is Orwell’s vision of power and control made literal.

The year is 1984 – or perhaps not. Time is slippery in Oceania. The truth changes every day. Surveillance is constant. Winston Smith, a minor functionary in the Party’s vast machine, harbours a dangerous impulse: the desire to think for himself. In a world where even dreams are suspect, rebellion begins with independent thought. But Big Brother is watching that, too.

Featuring recorded voices from Sophie Aldred and Joanna Lumley, with Simon Russell Beale as the omnipresent Big Brother, the production combines tight physical storytelling with eerie sound design. Under the direction of Adam Lenson and the company, the adaptation foregrounds the human cost of ideological conformity – how power reshapes not just public speech but private memory.

Box Tale Soup’s artisanal reimagining has earned a sweep of five-star reviews, with Broadway Baby calling it a “triumph” and British Theatre Guide praising its “fresh, inventive… frightening” edge. Rather than paying reverence to a text we think we already know, this production approaches 1984 with invention, finding new theatrical language for Orwell’s vision and making it feel immediate and unsettling once more.