As an Edward's virgin, sitting in the Meeting House foyer an hour or so before they go on, talk inevitably turns to their long association with the venue and some of their past successes (including plays about imprisoned writers after which the audience has been reduced to tears) and you can’t help but wonder if this is setting expectations impossibly high.

From the moment you enter the theatre, Big Brother is watching you, whether from the telescreen that dominates the simple set or the two seated columns of cast members dressed in their party uniforms. An eerie electronic music hums in the background. Throughout the play this music is used to great effect, conjuring up the same mundane claustrophobia of an awful situation from which there is no escape that Adam’s Death of Klinghoffer managed at last year’s International Festival.

The use of space is impressive too. The dystopian film had wide open spaces and to get that sense in such a small theatre is no mean feat. This is helped by a wonderfully choreographed ‘chorus’ of actors who, in many ways, steal the show. Their mimed routines of the daily grind of life as tiny cogs in a vast machine is superb, and its repetition devastating.

Not everything works perfectly. When we first encounter a rat, it doesn’t seem this is truly Winston Smith’s worst fear. When Winston and Julia confess themselves to a party official, it seems a bit too rushed (such moments are perhaps inevitable when cutting a work down, but they are few).

Winston and Julia are convincing both as lovers and Winston in his despair at society. But in many ways the show is stolen by the supporting cast. The way in which the ‘chorus’ switch so effortlessly and convincingly from party workers, to prols, to thought police. The two children, desperately eager to witness an execution. The beauty of the prol woman (no more so than when she sits peeling the potatoes), captured every bit as elegantly as the film.

The production is most haunting, though, in its modern parallels. A party worker’s savouring of the reduction of the language yet further, and the possibilities this brings. The ‘two minutes hate’. But, perhaps most powerfully when Smith’s interrogator talks of power as an end, not a means, one cannot help but think of certain politicians today.

It’s a production that leaves you utterly drained, if not in tears, and well understanding the comments in the foyer.

One last note, don’t waste a thought on how the rats will be brought off – when it comes it is both wonderful and chilling.

Tam Pollard