A Clockwork Orange

Everyman Theatre

Reviewed by Lisa Rydell

Alex is only 14 years old, but old enough to know that ‘being young is like being an animal’. When hearing A Clockwork Orange being mentioned, most of us think of Stanley Kubrick’s movie version from 1971. But that version, brilliant as it is, is still an adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel dated nine years earlier, an adaptation that Burgess himself wasn’t all happy with. With this in the background, going to see Dianne Hancock’s all-female cast perform the play promises to be an interesting experience.

The play – like Burgess’s original – concentrates more directly on deeper moral issues: can you really make a person good – doesn’t it really have to come from within? Like the Prison Chaplain states, thinking of the long-asked theological question of intention and will: when a human can’t choose, he ceases to be human. But the prisons need to be cleared in order to make place for political criminals, and intention and will is not seen as priority. Having heard some not-too-convinced voices in the audience expressing their view that the play didn’t manage to get to them but left them cold, feeling like cut-off spectators, the question is raised if that isn’t part of the deal. Isn’t being a cold observer part of the whole – and could we in this context ever be anything else?

Together with the philosophical question of choice, the polemics between the generations are also emphasised in the stage adaptation than in the film. Throughout the ages, discontinuity due to generation gaps can be much stronger and more averse than any difference in ideology or nationality. Enormous anger towards the older generation who ‘have built this rotten world we live in’ is apparent in the play. The behaviour of Alex and her likes can be seen not only as totally uncontrollable outbursts of destructive energy, but also as an act of real rebellion against their elders and the society they live in. A society that isn’t all that great, and that in spite of a sometimes quite incomprehensible language, bears a bit too close a resemblance to the one we live in. A Clockwork Orange isn’t the easiest story to do a take on, but I feel this version managed to ask all the important questions.