That's Entertainment!

A night at the theater generally involves dressing to the nines, perhaps dinner beforehand at a nearby restaurant and finally the play. Fainting, vomiting, screaming and fighting are not typically part of the experience.

Yet that’s exactly what audience members experienced at the new staging of George Orwell’s “1984,” which opened Thursday at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre after previews in London.

The play, co-written and co-directed by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, stars Tom Sturridge as Winston Smith and Olivia Wilde as his illegal love interest Julia. Like the 1949 book on which it is based, the play presents a dystopian future run by Big Brother in which a shadowy government uses propaganda, brainwashing, fake news and torture to control its subjects.

While many adaptations of the book downplayed some of the book’s more graphic aspects, in particular its torture scenes, this staging does nothing of the sort.

In the story, Smith is detained by Big Brother and taken to Room 101, where he is heavily tortured until his anti-Big Brother spirit finally breaks.

Mr. First Nighter (z''l)

During the Room 101 scenes in the play, the “main set is destroyed and transforms into a sterile white box, blasted with searing light,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. His torturers yell out ominous words like “fingertips” or teeth.” Then strobe lights flash maddeningly while the piercing, punishing sounds of a jackhammer fills the room.

“Blood is spattered and spit out; at least one beating about the face,” wrote Vulture’s Christopher Bonanos, who called these scenes, “visceral, ghastly, and hair-raisingly vivid.”

In the play, as the character Smith bleeds heavily and is later electrocuted, he stares into the eyes of individual audience members and yells that they’re “complicit.”

During these scenes in London, several audience members fainted and others vomited. Police were called to break up a fight after one staging. At others, audience members yelled at the actors, begging them to stop.

One audience member reportedly fainted at the Broadway debut Thursday. . . .

The play comes with the following warning and age restriction: “This production contains flashing lights, strobe effects, loud noises, gunshots, smoking, and graphic depictions of violence and torture. It is not suitable for children under 14.” Security guards, meanwhile, are posted around the Hudson Theater to monitor audience reactions.

The New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley wrote  . . .  “The interrogations that Winston undergoes in the play’s second half are graphic enough to verge on torture porn.”

Rooney mirrored these thoughts, also employing the term “torture porn” to describe the play, which he called a “grim, sphincter-clenching sit.” . . .

– The Washington Post, June 26, 2017