1984 (Broadway) NYC Reviews and Tickets
Member Reviews (627)
See it if It misses the boat of Orwell's book.
Don't see it if If you liked the book, nothing like it. Does not go deep enough, director could have done so much more with this play.
See it if you're willing to endure a messy misfire. W/its assault on ears/eyes, 1984 repulses ...and fails to truly engage our emotions.
Don't see it if you have issues w/migraines from flashing lights and painfully loud sounds. Script doesn't tell story well. Tom S's accent annoys. Read more
See it if you're curious about a stage adaptation, the current political situation upsets you, you fear the coming of Big Brother,
Don't see it if don't like unexpected use of bizarre loud noises and bright light, bloody depictions of bodily harm, overall sense of unease Read more
See it if you want to see an inventive, grim staging of Orwell's dystopian novel; you want to see the origins of "fake news" & "alternative facts".
Don't see it if you're unprepared for an assault on your senses in a brutal, loud, bloody, in-your-face production, played more for shock value than empathy
See it if you're interested in spending 101 minutes meditating on the definition/malleability of reality.
Don't see it if you'd be disturbed by some pretty graphic violence, or you're looking for some escapist fluff.
See it if You done your homework & know what you're going to see. You're OK w/unnerving themes & staging. You're familiar w/the book.
Don't see it if You can't handle stage violence or angst-inducing themes. You want dynamic acting-w/the exception of Reed Birney, the acting's flat. Read more
See it if you are looking for an intense experience; you can separate yourself from what you see; you like good story/acting especially from Sturridge
Don't see it if you're squeamish/cannot tolerate mental/physical violence. The play is worth seeing, but it is very unnerving and difficult to watch.
See it if You must see everything Reed Briney does because he is a great stage actor
Don't see it if you are expecting to be shocked or moved in anyway Read more
Critic Reviews (54)
“You may well find pleasurable pain in the discombobulating stage adaptation…But it will be pain of a different order (possibly involving nausea) from the empathetic kind you experience reading Orwell’s ever-engrossing book…There is an ordering intelligence behind this ostensible muddle...The show’s self-sabotaging ambiguity is meant to make us question every version of reality that’s on offer...That nebulousness is the play’s most ingenious aspect, and also its most irritating.”
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“Intense in a way I’ve never seen on Broadway: It’s gut-churning…This gripping show rewards watching, though…As technology becomes more pervasive and ideology more rigid, it is hard not to drawing associations between Orwell’s horror story and the way we live now. But be warned: ‘1984’ is spikier than you might remember from reading it in high school...What makes this antipropaganda broadside so lastingly compelling is how successfully it resists decaying into propaganda itself.”
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“Though it’s a little off-putting to see perhaps 20 percent of a play mediated on a big TV, it’s a legitimate idea for theater-making, inventively and thoughtfully deployed. What’s weak, astonishingly enough, is the script, at least for the first hour…But then comes the arrest, and the whole thing starts to snap together. The torture scenes are visceral, ghastly, and hair-raisingly vivid...Birney is just about perfect in the role.”
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“While I can imagine this visceral production being chillingly effective in an intimate venue, I found it distancing and unsatisfying in a Broadway house. It's also a massive, bludgeoning downer. The impressive stagecraft constantly overpowers the human element of the drama — the cast's committed performances notwithstanding…There's a heavy-handedness to the storytelling that makes it just as often numbing as unsettling. Which is not to say the adaptation lacks skill or inventiveness."
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“‘1984’ doesn’t have the same foreboding effect audiences might expect from a book that’s continually felt eerily prescient for decades. Still, the acting is phenomenal and the wildly innovative production makes for a memorable show…A play doesn’t allow for quite the amount of world-building that can be accomplished in a book, so the full extent of Big Brother’s rule isn’t quite as rich as it is in Orwell’s original work. But the creative team has found new ways to bring the story to life.”
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“Tough to take — but worth the cost of losing your lunch…It’s the unnerving sound-and-light show that really gets under your skin and burrows, wormlike, into your brain…Winston comes alive, although Sturridge is so wound up he never really surrenders to sex and love…Orwell’s suggestion that Big Brother doesn’t actually exist — that he is, in fact, all of us — really knocks us out.”
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"A multimedia extravaganza...Broadly faithful to the novel, with Orwell’s moral left wholly intact...The continuing applicability of this moral makes it regrettable that '1984' isn’t more theatrically potent than it turns out to be. Some scenes do have tremendous punch...It helps that sound design and lighting are so fine, and two of the performances are equally noteworthy...'1984' would hit home harder were it set not in a sort-of-nowish not-quite-London but in, say, Pyongyang."
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“A frequently harrowing adaptation…The show memorably reinvents one of the most terrifying tales of modern times…It lets Orwell speak for himself, though in a distilled version that must make blatantly visual what the novel takes pains to incite in the consciousness…Sturridge has a jittery, piercing appeal…Wilde has a contained abandon that emphasizes Julia’s revolutionary urges without caricature. Birney proves once again to be a master of emotional concealment that works to expose.”
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