The clue is in the title. Here are the details and you can read more about the play from when it was TMINE’s Wednesday Play
Sunday September 8
1984 (1954) + Q&A
BBFC Advice: Contains mild scenes of torture.
Film Information Running Time: 1hr 47mins
BBFC Advice: PG
Location: Tyneside Cinema
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with Dr Elsa Bouet, Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University and expert in George Orwell and Dystopian Fiction, and journalist David Ryan, author of George Orwell on Screen.
In a future authoritarian state, Winston Smith rebels by beginning an illicit love affair and plotting revolution.
Nigel Kneale’s adaptation of George Orwell’s most celebrated novel was one of the most controversial television programmes of its time, and marks a key transitional moment in the development of television drama in Britain.
Orwell’s warning of a totalitarian future – with one eye on the Soviet present – was just six years old when Kneale and producer Rudolph Cartier (in modern terms, the director) enacted it for the small screen, and audiences and critics were unprepared for the brutality endured by its hapless hero, Winston Smith.
Like all TV drama of the time, 1984 was broadcast live, but it made unusually extensive and imaginative use of filmed inserts – 14 in total. These sequences bought time for the more elaborate costume changes or scene set-ups, but also served to ‘open out’ the action – showing us both the desolate ‘prole sector’ and the apparently idyllic woods where Winston (Peter Cushing) and Julia (Yvonne Mitchell) have their first illicit meeting – while speeding up the drama by reducing the average shot length.
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