13 - Nineteen Eighty-Four on Radio, Stage, and Screen

Summary

Nineteen Eighty-Four, as even a glance at recent news articles suggests, is a text which we perennially feel the need to bring to bear upon our own circumstances. Rather than exploring the ways in which our circumstances align with those of Orwell’s novel, this chapter instead considers the complicity of stage, screen, and radio adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four in promoting a sense of its perpetual pertinence to the world today. Moving from a radio adaptation starring David Niven broadcast months after the novel’s publication to a ballet produced sixty years later, this chapter charts the changing contexts in which eleven adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four have been staged, arguing that various readings (and misreadings) are encouraged, both subtly and overtly, by adaptations with a commercial stake in securing the primacy and continued relevance of Orwell’s work. Following this line of thought, the chapter questions the elements of Orwell’s work which have secured its popularity, considering the changes and replications of adaptation as, respectively, mitigation for the ephemerality of Orwell’s satire and an exposure of his own ambivalent relationship to the qualities of popular fiction which he derides as ‘prolefeed’.