@ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 3 Oct 2015
When Aldous Huxley wrote about a jet-fuelled future where people travel from London to New Mexico for a long weekend and where babies are made to order, he showed he was not a novelist but a clairvoyant. A play of this dense yet spirited novel might appear to be aimed squarely at the sixth form school outing (and there were a fair amount of fidgety students at the Edinburgh first night).
Huxley’s 1931 novel was informed by world in flux: the Depression, the movies (he was a Hollywood scriptwriter for a time) and the wonderful world of psychology. The novel is a thundering synthesis of predictions and observations from a time when “racial progress” was seen by many as a legitimate goal.
In this dystopian, future embryos are genetically modified to fit a rigid caste system. Alphas are leaders and members of the CEO community while Zetas do the recycling. Lives are predestined and soulless, individuals numbed by Viagra-like “sex gum” and Soma – Prozac/ecstasy tabs – and high-tech gizmos attuned to the self-obsessed. Having negative feelings is banned. “When the individual feels, the community reels” is one of society’s straplines. It’s an unbearably real echo of David Cameron’s chilling top-down meritocracy of oligarchs and minimum-wage worker ants pimped-up by the likes of Apple and Amazon.
Enter Bernard Marx (Gruffudd Glyn) an Alpha with Beta tendencies – he’s more middle manager than top exec and threatened with banishment. With his sex puppet Lenina Crowne (Olivia Morgan), on a trip to a savage reservation, the pair befriend John (a riveting William Postlethwaite) and his mother (ugh, another concept banned in this New World) played superbly by Abigail McKern who are spirited back to “civilisation” where their secret past may just secure Bernard’s future. John becomes a Shakespeare-spouting celeb with more than a touch of the Russell Brand about him.
The novel is full of ideas and clever allusions to a future world that must have once seemed improbably lunatic, yet a worrying number of Huxley’s predictions have come to pass: art and poetry have been replaced by creative industries that benefit the economy; big business dictates and spies on our every move; consumers are addicted to vain fantasies; and for every ill there’s a pill. Womb transplants, embryo research and assisted dying are the stuff of today’s headlines, not speculation.
Dawn King’s Royal and Derngate adaptation packs a lot of Huxley onto the stage – the opening scenes are tirelessly explicatory. Maybe there are too many characters for comfort. Director James Dacre needs to make a judicious trim of a few scenes and speeches to carry the audience every inch of the way. There’s some cracking lighting and video from Colin Grenfell and Keith Skretch respectively and the head-banging score is provided by These New Puritans.
When John the Savage finally declares “there’s more to life than personal fulfilment” the sixth formers look baffled.