Brave New World
Solent People's Theatre, Portsmouth

David Clements

The prospect of issues-based outreach theatre, the cast fresh from a tour of Hampshire schools, filled me with dreaded visions of Legs Akimbo, the excruciating parody featured in The League of Gentlemen. Thankfully, Solent People's Theatre avoided most of the pitfalls of such projects, with their production of Brave New World, its first adaptation for the stage (endorsed, significantly, by Huxley's widow).

Indeed, it would be more instructive to compare their interpretation to those of the Reduced Shakespeare (or Shak-speare, as the Savage refers to him) Company, and their bite-sized Bard. Though Brendon Burns' feverish pace leaves little room for character development, he nonetheless crams the book into an entertaining hour and ten minutes. Perhaps indicative of the attempt to keep a young audience engaged, there was an element of theatre by numbers. And the multimedia approach was a little hit and miss, sometimes enhancing, elsewhere distracting from the performance.

Funding by the Wellcome Trust needn't necessarily lead to puppetry by purse strings. There was no conditioning by biomedical corporate interests (as one might expect, for instance, from the Hatchery), no releasing of Soma through the air conditioning or invitations to electro-magnetic golfing sweeteners. In fact, the Solent gave a faithful interpretation of Huxley's central thesis, 'Man has been subordinated to his own inventions'. Not exactly a warm endorsement of scientific endeavour. Regrettably, the themes with greatest resonance for a contemporary audience were left hanging, when they could have been interrogated to dramatic effect.

The drilled inhabitants of Brave New World would perhaps be familiar with our own. Indeed Bernard Marx, the humane anti-hero of the book, would find our rather sanitised (sterilisation = civilisation), passion-lite ('everybody belongs to everybody'), anti-heroic ('anybody can be noble now') times similarly distasteful. Though the production didn't engage with such parallels (the conditioned shopper analogy, for instance, was clumsy) it was a fitting appetiser for the discussion to follow.

The performance and discussion reviewed took place at Guildhall Square, Portsmouth on 13 March 2004.