Who Is Julia? What Is She? | Jessica Carmichael gives Nineteen Eighty-Four a female twist in Ministry of Love.
Jessica Carmichael somehow passed through high school without ever having to read Nineteen Eighty-Four. But George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel tracked her down anyway.
“When Jessica was working at a bookstore, she noticed that someone would come in and buy this novel every day, without fail,” explains Cole Lewis, who adapted Orwell’s text into a new stage show called Ministry of Love. “She hadn’t read it before, so she picked up a copy for herself and at once she saw connections between the novel and Theatre of the Oppressed, which is how we’re staging Ministry of Love.”
After Carmichael thought of marrying the dystopian themes of the novel and the form of theatre pioneered by Brazilian director Augusto Boal (which involves direct audience participation and destruction of the fourth wall) her colleagues at Théâtre Rien-Pantoute took the concept one step further: they suggested making Julia, the doomed lover of activist Winston Smith, the main character.
“Julia’s quite underwritten in the novel,” Lewis says. “She’s kind of like a wet dream for Winston, in the way that she’s available. But we saw an opportunity to explore the events of the novel from her perspective. It’s ambiguous as to whether she’s a traitor or not, and we felt that her side of the story was our way in. It was something that hadn’t been attempted before....
“We had to steal from Winston a bit, so Julia is a little like Winston in some regards. Winston sees his love of Julia as a form of active rebellion. Julia sees her own integrity and sense of humanity as a form of rebellion. What we’re trying to do is separate those two things and give them to two different characters.”
This process of both adaptation and composition hasn’t been easy. The script is constantly being rewritten, even as opening night approaches. Some of these changes have been as minute as trading lines between characters, while others are fundamental to the play’s structure.
And the changes will continue even after the premiere, as the interactive elements of the production are ironed out. The goal, Lewis explains, is to put together something that is innovative but still theatrical. The last thing Lewis and Carmichael want to do is stage “just another play.”
“We want to come up with something new,” Lewis says. “We want to create a story and we want to have a discussion around that story, but we don’t want it to be a one-way lecture. We want to use theatrical elements to make the debate come alive onstage. If we can manage to get through these shows with our sanity, I’ll consider it a success.”
