MOST POLITICAL NOVELS have a limited life. Not so George Orwell's bitter denunciation of totalitarian rule, 1984. Fifty-eight years after its first publication, and 23 years after the setting of the story, Orwell's attack on authoritarian ideologies is as relevant as ever. The story has recently resurfaced in a new form - as a play directed by a Hollywood star.
Tim Robbins, who's bringing the Michael Gene Sullivan stage adaption to this year's Hong Kong Arts Festival, sees many similarities between 1984 and the tactics of US President George Bush's neo-conservative administration.
'When I first read Sullivan's play, I didn't believe it could be a pure adaptation of Orwell's book,' says Robbins by phone from his home in New York City. 'It seemed too similar to what's going on in America today. I suspected that the author had taken some liberties to make it mirror current events. But when I reread the book, I was wrong. The play was actually very faithful. Orwell's original work was strikingly relevant.'
Orwellian ideas such as the all-seeing Big Brother are well known. But the detailed politics of Orwell's work are often forgotten. A left-leaning Democratic Socialist for most of his life, Orwell wrote 1984 after his experiences with the International Brigade, a group of republican sympathisers who went to Spain to fight against Franco's fascist Falange in the Spanish Civil War. (Orwell's time in Spain is documented in Homage To Catalonia).
The war was dispiriting for Orwell. Not only did the republicans lose to Franco's German-backed fascists, it was betrayed by Stalin's Russian communists. The Russians had been supporting the republicans - a mixture of communists, anarchists, socialists, and international volunteers - but viciously turned against them. The betrayal turned Orwell against communism, and he began to regard it as a skewed manifestation of fascism.
1984, which followed Orwell's allegorical Animal Farm, is set in an authoritarian society in which the state brainwashes its citizens to maintain power. The ruling party, simply called the Party, demands total belief in its principles. Truth becomes what the Party says it is. If the Party says, as it does in 1984, that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. Most people in 1984 live in a state of contradiction, believing in things that are contrary to logic and their senses.
It was this Doublethink, as Orwell called it, that interested Robbins. He says he felt it was relevant to today's America because neo-conservative Republicans have excelled at a type of Doublethink.
