Sunday, May 28, 2017

1984 LIVE READING TO BE STAGED AS ACT OF SUBVERSION


TUESDAY 6TH JUNE – SENATE HOUSE – 9AM UNTIL 9PM – FREE
COME FOR AS LONG AS YOU LIKE
 

#1984LIVE
Remember: this is a free event. You do not need a ticket - audience members are free to attend when they like and stay as long as they would like. First-come, first-served.
We are delighted to announce more details about our upcoming event at the UCL Festival of Culture: 1984 Live. 1984 Live is a free, all-day reading of 1984 on the site of the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth, staged as an act of subversion in itself.

Two days before an era-defining general election in a moment of political turbulance, Orwell's vision of a dystopian future in which mass surveillance, complete social segregation and isolationist policies define the life of its citizens, will be read out loud in whole for the first time ever in the UK. As politics of fake news, ‘alternative facts’, reframing the truth, and social media’s destruction of ideas about the private self become the norm, the book has never been more prescient.


Nineteen Eighty-Four will be read in full at the building on which Orwell based the Ministry of Truth - Senate House. The full reading, featuring over 50 leading cultural figures will also have immersive staged elements, submerging audiences in the world of Big Brother, IngSoc and The Party. Using projection, and actors from UCL, the audience will be able to absorb the intrigue and horror of 1984.


Presented by the Orwell Foundation and UCL Festival of Culture, the reading is directed by Hannah Price and produced by Libby Brodie Productions.
The reading will also be live-streamed online here

Libraries and Theatres across the country will show the screening and organise satellite events and activities (including in Poole, Leeds, Halton, York, Cardiff and Canterbury – for more information see here).
 
Readers announced: Billy Bragg
Billy Bragg is a recording artist, performer and activist. His albums include Life's a Riot with Spy Vs Spy, Talking with the Taxman About PoetryDon't Try This at HomeEngland, Half English, and Tooth and Nail. He is the author of Roots, Radicals and Rockers, published by Faber and Faber on 1st June 2017.

Mark Ravenhill
Mark Ravenhill is a playwright, actor and journalist. He has written over 20 plays including Some Explicit Polaroids (1999) and Mother Clap's Molly House (2001). In 2012, he became Writer-in-Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He is Associate Director of London's Little Opera House at The King's Head Theatre.

Ece Temelkuran
Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish writer and journalist. She was fired by her editor at the newspaper Milliyet in 2012 for writing a column critical of the Turkish government. She has published 12 books and has been a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute of the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

Further readers include: Richard Blair (Orwell’s son), Alan Johnson MP, award-winning writer Aminatta Forna, journalist Peter Hitchens, Baroness Patience Wheatcroft, broadcaster and historian David Olusoga and activist Jack Monroe.

For more information, click here.

No comments: