What is astonishing about this production is just how much the audience feels a part of it. Torches are shone in the viewer’s faces making them squint to see, the base of the sound effects is deliberately up so high that your stomach rumbles as you strain to hear over the firemen setting fires and the time the much feared firemen glare at the public, making a point in challenging everyone’s eye contact at least once.
This is a tough and bold adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 a science fiction tale similar in tone to George Orwell’s 1984. Only in Bradbury’s story, society, in the ultimate act of censorship, has made books illegal and firemen, instead of putting out fires, must burn them. The State’s ultimate aim is to suppress learning and attempts to keep its people in media saturated indifference.
Such an epic tale could not be put in better hands than the Godlight Theatre Company, who did a sensational job of transforming, A Clockwork Orange into a gut wrenching theatre production for last year’s Fringe.
While this new adaptation doesn’t have the same physical urgency that A Clockwork Orange had, it is still a brilliant show.
The acting from all the cast is exceptional, and special mention should go to Gregory Konow who excels as the troubled fireman, Guy Montag.
The show is immaculately choreographed and despite limited props manages to convey the more science fiction elements by using the cast that are currently not speaking, in all manner of inventive ways.
Bold, tough and even more relevant fifty years on, congratulations should go to Godlight as they have done it once again.
4/5
Martin Miller
