‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,” George Orwell’s parable of the coming of Stalinist totalitarianism to England, is the most significant political novel of the 20th century—but one with which many readers are by now so familiar that they can no longer come to it fresh. Adapting it for the stage is one way to restore the immediacy of Orwell’s nightmare vision, but the 2014 West End production of the Robert Icke-Duncan Macmillan stage version, which played on Broadway three years ago, was a bells-and-whistles multimedia extravaganza that strayed too far from the original novel for its own good. Not so Michael Gene Sullivan’s no-frills,...

Source: Wall Street Journal April 02, 2020 20:26 UTC