1984

West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds/Touring

5 Stars

Headlong's powerful adaptation of 1984 is the theatrical equivalent of being trapped in a room full of mirrors.

Handheld cameras capture live action and play it back in real time on giant video screens. Conversations are looped in diminishing circles. Snippets of Oranges And Lemons are repeated as ringtones and hums. Time shifts from an indeterminate future, sending shards of reflection into the past and present.

The action is contained within the wood-panelled walls of a book club that reverses the narrative of George Orwell's dystopian novel. Its "appendix" is the starting point, a back-to-front framing device that confuses the linear nature of time, emphasised in Chloe Lamford's retro-futuristic set design.

Within this, the club's six members discuss Winston Smith's diary under the watchful eye of a Midwich Cuckoo-faced child and a waitress whose red waist sash signals her resemblance to a "party member."

Individuals are gradually sucked from the present day into the past, with each having a character double in the other era.

It's a time clash that makes for uncomfortable viewing, with action freezing in retina-burning white lights and electronic hisses.

The technique is used to especially disturbing effect during the re-education of Smith - a brilliantly believable Mark Arends - in the Ministry Of Love.

Those notorious scenes in Orwell's novel are brought alive with clinical, toe-curling agony while the audience's voyeurism is upended when the house lights are turned on and O'Brien (Tim Dutton) lectures to it directly, as he had previously addressed the book group.

Throughout, the notion of multiple truths highlights the ease with which civil liberties are eroded, engendering uncertainty of the future.

Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan's adaptation brilliantly challenges the audience to be less complacent about their own freedoms and brings the novel's timeless themes bang up to date.

Tours until March 29, details: www.headlong.co.uk

Susan Darlington