Novel vs. Stage Play–a comparison
In creating the claustrophobic world of 1984, where no one has any privacy and wrong thinking is punishable by death, Orwell limited his own ability to tell his story in any way except as an omniscient narrator, revealing his main character’s inmost thoughts. Winston Smith is a loyal Outer Party member who secretly hates the Party and Big Brother. But since he cannot tell or show these things in any way, much of the book is an extended internal monologue.
Obviously, this won’t work onstage. The adaptation we are using, by Robert Owens, Wilton E Hall, Jr , and William A Miles, Jr, is referred to by Dramatic Publishing as “the authorized version” of the novel. It is certainly the earliest one, having been written in 1963. It is unclear who “authorized” this adaptation, but one presumes it was the executors of Orwell’s estate, since he had died a year after the novel’s publication.
Telling a story onstage presents challenges never faced by the author of a novel. Limited time, limited space, the need to portray visually both ideas and objects…all this may require some departures from a strictly literal approach to adaptation. In addition to truncating events for the stage, the play makes several significant changes to the characters portrayed. The most notable is the character of Julia: