The spacious bar area of the Royal & Derngate Theatre in Northampton doesn't look much like a teenage wasteland. At the first night post-show party for the theatre's co-production with The Touring Consortium

of Brave New World, Dawn King's adaptation of Aldous Huxley's increasingly recognisable dystopian novel, it's the sounds of Baba O'Riley, The Who's damning statement on a strung-out, acid-fried Woodstock generation that underscores the chit-chat beside the drinks table.

The song's airing is probably an accident, but, given Huxley's prophetic study of a society numbed into submission by a pill called Soma, and where sexual promiscuity is encouraged to the point that no one feels a thing, Pete Townshend's counterblast to the summer of love sounds oddly appropriate.

The play itself, as directed by Royal & Derngate artistic director James Dacre, is as state of the art as it gets, a fast-moving voyage through a world where a medically-bred elite call the shots and where those who attempt to live free are treated like freaks. All of which was already there in Huxley's novel, written in 1931, and which was a gift for King.

“It appealed to me immediately,” she says, “because one of the many things I like is science fiction. Not only is this a classic piece of science fiction, but in terms of doing an adaptation it's really good material, though it's also very challenging. It's got lots of plot, and there's all these concepts about how the future is. Then, going back and re reading the book, I was really surprised about how much of it seemed to be about my life, and that's what I wanted to bring to it, this idea that it's about our life now.”

Dacre and King's take on Brave New World arrives at a time when dystopian worlds are being shown onstage with increasing regularity. Brave New World follows Headlong's similarly hi-tech take on George Orwell's 1984, while a new production taken from William Golding's novel, Lord of the Flies, will shortly tour to Scotland. With this in mind, for King at least, the future has already arrived, and it's not very pretty.

“We live in really dystopian times,” King observes. “You only have to open up the paper and it reads like science-fiction. There's a huge tension between my life, and that I can be having a ridiculous conversation about wanting some silver trainers or something, and then watching or reading about people dying trying to get here.

“There's so much money floating around, but we still seemingly can't do anything to resolve any of these things. There's also this vast spectre of climate change, which everyone knows about, and I think does affect people's moods in a way that I think does make them feel a little bit dystopian.”

For Dacre, how people react to dystopian times is key to Huxley's entire outlook on how we may or may not live now.

“I think something that distinguishes Brave New World and Huxley from writers like Orwell, Asimov, Atwood and HG Wells and others associated with that dystopian canon is that it's very open-armed,” Dacre points out. “There's a great sense of character, humanity and pathos in the book, but I also I think it's uniquely interested in how science, commerce, technology and politics will affect human behaviour in the future. Huxley was less interested in how the world might look than he was in how any changes that happen in all those spheres might change how we relate to one another.”

In terms of science-fiction's relationship with theatre, King points out as well how she believes that “theatre culture's changing a bit. Science-fiction isn't done that much onstage, but now there are science-fiction plays that are being done at the Royal Court or in the West end in a way that wasn't happening before, and I find that really exciting.”

Northampton is no stranger to science-fiction. Veteran fantasy and science-fiction comic book writer and cultural alchemist Alan Moore lives just around the corner from the Royal & Derngate in Northhampton, a city he recently described as “absolutely average,” but also a “very unusual town.”

The latter certainly tallies with the thinking of the protagonists of Energy in Northampton, a sci-fi single released by Northampton Development corporation way back in 1980. The song, which was picked up by Radio 1 alternative music icon John Peel, tells the story of an alien race looking for a place to build a new home that offers them a bright new future, with Northampton a somewhat less than obvious choice.

That jaunty retro slice of synth-pop is light years away from These New Puritans' soundtrack for Brave New World, awash as it is with stentorian electronic stylings that lend the show atmosphere and pulse. For These New Puritans composer and songwriter Jack Barnett, who since 2006 has led his band through three hip hop, electronica and contemporary classical-inspired albums, composing for theatre for the first time was a liberation.

“I didn't know much about theatre,” Barnett says, “but we've been asked to do stuff like this several times before, and after a while you feel you should stop saying no. It was great fun to do. I'd read the book when I was about sixteen, and I re-read it, and we talked about what to leave in and what to leave out, because there's so many different ideas in it. Then working on the music was very different for me. I have a tendency to write too much stuff and have to edit it down, but this process made a virtue of that, and I was able to step outside of myself, and only when you do that do you find out what your limits are. It made me write in a different way, and gave me a different impetus to write.”

Such artistic emancipation may go against the grain of Brave New World's over-ridingly bleak world-view, but Dacre sees the story itself as something similarly liberating.

“Huxley delights in contradictions,” Dacre says, “and that allows different arguments and ideas to be discussed in a way that enables the reader to make up their own mind. In a world where we're bombarded by social media and stimuli of all kinds, that’s something we hope can give theatre audiences the space to do that.”

Brave New World is at the Kings Theatre, Edinburgh, September 29 to October 3.

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