Brave New World
Kings Theatre, Edinburgh Neil Cooper Four stars
"Forget about the future," says pill-pacified pleasure seeker Leninakan at one point in Dawn King's stage adaptation of Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1931 novel en route to an emotion-free liaison with Bernard Marx, the most awkward alpha male in town. "There's nothing we can do about it. Just live for today."
Such a self-absorbed lifestyle choice was probably as all the rage in Huxley's between-the-wars world as it is today. All dressed up in space-age wigs, video projections resembling a Brian Eno installation and a stentorian electronic soundscape care of pop panoramicists These New Puritans, James Dacre's production for the Royal and Derngate, Northampton and The Touring Consortium renders the story as an all too recognisable prophecy.
It opens as a lecture, with the audience the new trainers being given a guided tour around a hatchery centre where test tube babies are sired in a social caste system that seemingly seals their fate for a half-life of feels-free kicks. This sets a tone of dispassionate ice-cool ennui only broken when Grufford Glyn's Bernard goes in a not so hot date to the badlands with Olivia Morgan's Lenina. Here they stumble in William Postlethwaite's John The Savage, a Shakespeare-quoting but of rough who becomes a messiah-like cause célèbre, inspiring random outbreaks of sex, violence and poetry before running off to the wilderness with Lenina.
Watching over all this is the World State Controller, Mond, played by Sophie Ward as a gimlet-eyed social engineer who calls the shots. The production is a slickly realised if bleakly desolate affair that suggests people power has already been tranquilised into submission.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here