ORWELL FESTIVAL GALA NIGHT & ORWELL PRIZE DEBATES Announced For Trafalgar Studio

Orwell: A Celebration at Trafalgar Studios 8 June - 4 July 2009, Gala Night on 12 June and The Orwell Prize debates finalised Gala Night, Friday 12 June at 7.45pm

Performance of Orwell: A Celebration on the 70th anniversary of the publication date of Coming up for Air. With an introductory speech by Shami Chakrabati, Director of Liberty, celebrating 75 years since it was founded. All proceeds go to Liberty and The Orwell Prize.

Tickets at £50 each are available from the Box Office: 0870 060 6632

www.orwellcelebration.org or www.ambassadortickets.com

The Orwell Prize debates
The Orwell Prize is delighted to be organising four panel events celebrating the 60th anniversary of 1984 and the 70th anniversary of Coming Up for Air, in conjunction with Orwell: A Celebration, a month-long festival of stage adaptations by Telegraph theatre critic Dominic Cavendish of George Orwell's books and essays.
Saturday 13th June | 5-6pm | Trafalgar Studios

Coming Up for Air: Unemployment and Uncertainty

Andy Beckett | Lisa Harker | Paul Mason | Chaired by Jean Seaton

Does anyone who isn't dead from the neck up doubt that there's a bad time coming? We don't even know what it'll be, and yet we know it's coming. Perhaps a war, perhaps a slump-no knowing, except that it'll be something bad. Wherever we're going, we're going downwards. Into the grave, into the cesspool-no knowing.

Orwell's underrated novel Coming Up for Air, published 70 years ago in 1939, was written at a time of great uncertainty: war was looming, industrialisation and capitalism was changing the face of the country, and Britain was still recovering from the Great Depression. With Britain today facing the effects of the global economic crisis, and with unemployment over 2 million and rising, we explore the effect of unemployment and how to tackle it, and the lessons of the past.

Andy Beckett is the author of the recently published When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies. He studied Modern History at Oxford University and Journalism at the University of California in Berkeley. Since 1993, he has written for the New York Times, the Economist, the Independent on Sunday and the London Review of Books. For the last twelve years, he has been a feature writer at the Guardian. He was nominated as Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year for his first book, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile's Hidden History (2002).
Lisa Harker is the co-director of the Institute for Public Policy Research. She previously worked for the BBC as a Social Affairs Specialist, advising journalists across the Corporation, and as a producer on the Today programme. She was instrumental in transforming the Day Care Trust into the leading childcare organisation in the country, before being appointed as the Government's child poverty tsar at the Department for Work and Pensions, where she wrote Delivering on Child Poverty: What would it take? She has also worked as an independent consultant for numerous government departments, jointly with Carey Oppenheim.

Paul Mason is the award-winning economics editor of BBC Newsnight, covering an agenda he describes as ‘profit, people and planet'. A former professional musician and university lecturer, he spent nine years covering business for specialist magazines and newspapers (including as deputy editor of Computer Weekly) before joining Newsnight in 2001. Author of the Idle Scrawl blog, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2009, he has also written two books: Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global (2007) and Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (2009).

Jean Seaton (Chair) is Director of the Orwell Prize and reports co-editor of Political Quarterly. She is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster, and has written on the history and role of the media in politics, wars, revolutions, religion and childhood. Her books include Power Without Responsibility: the Press and Broadcasting in Britain (with James Curran), Carnage and the Media: the Making and Reporting of News about Violence, and What Can Be Done? Making the Media and Politics Better (with John Lloyd). She is working on the Official History of the BBC between 1974-1987.

Saturday 20th June | 5-6pm | Trafalgar Studios

Adapting Orwell
Dominic Cavendish | Chris Durlacher
Orwell never lived to see televisions become as ubiquitous as the telescreens of 1984; none of his own recordings for radio are known to survive; he wrote nothing serious for the stage; and in noting that ‘everyone in this world has someone else whom he can look down on', felt ‘the book

reviewer is better off than the film critic' since the latter ‘is expected to sell his honour for a glass

of inferior sherry'.
Nevertheless, his works have been adapted for screen (big and small), radio and stage, as blockbusters, monologues, dramas, documentaries, musicals and operas. We'll be asking some of those involved in adapting Orwell about the challenges, the opportunities, the pressures and the pleasures of adapting some of the best-known works in the English language.

Dominic Cavendish is the deputy theatre critic, and comedy critic, for the Daily Telegraph. He is the founding editor of theatrevoice.com, the biggest online resource for audio material about British theatre, now managed by the V&A museum, and has also written on theatre and the arts for The Independent, Time Out and the Big Issue. His adaptation of Coming Up for Air premiered to rave reviews at the Edinburgh Festival 2008, and is joined by treatments of the interrogation scene from 1984, ‘A Hanging' and ‘Shooting an Elephant' for Orwell: A Celebration.
Chris Durlacher is a writer, director and producer whose credits include Kenneth Tynan: In Praise of Hardcore for BBC FOUR. In 2003, he wrote the screenplay for George Orwell: A Life in Pictures for the BBC. A Life in Pictures starred Chris Langham as George Orwell, and used Orwell's written output to create a video archive (only one piece of film is known to exist of the real Orwell, from his time at Eton). George Orwell: A Life in Pictures was acclaimed by the critics, nominated for three BAFTA awards, and winner of an Emmy Award for arts programming.

Saturday 27th June | 5-6pm | Trafalgar Studios

1984: Thoughtcrime

Maajid Nawaz | Chaired by Jean Seaton

Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
Thoughtcrime - crimethink in Newspeak - is one of the most terrifying of Orwell's conceits in 1984, where even thinking in opposition to the regime is a treacherous offence. 60 years after the novel was written, and 25 years after the year in which it was set, is thoughtcrime a reality? Are there certain thoughts and beliefs which should be punished? How should society deal with those who thoughts go beyond accepted political and social norms? And what does it feel like to think the unthinkable, controversial and uncomfortable?

Maajid Nawaz is the Director and co-founder of Quilliam, the world's first counter-extremism think tank. Maajid was formerly on the UK national leadership for the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir and was involved in the organisation for 14 years. He was a founding member of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Denmark and Pakistan before being imprisoned in Egypt for belonging to the group. In prison, he was adopted as an Amnesty International ‘prisoner of conscience' and began to change his views. He now engages in counter-Islamist thought-generating, writing, debating and media appearances, and holds degrees from the LSE and SOAS.

Jean Seaton (Chair) is Director of the Orwell Prize and reports co-editor of Political Quarterly. She is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster, and has written on the history and role of the media in politics, wars, revolutions, religion and childhood. Her books include Power Without Responsibility: the Press and Broadcasting in Britain (with James Curran), Carnage and the Media: the Making and Reporting of News about Violence, and What Can Be Done? Making the Media and Politics Better (with John Lloyd). She is working on the Official History of the BBC between 1974-1987.

Saturday 4th July | 5-6pm | Trafalgar Studios

1984: Torture

Clare Algar | Glen Newey | Chaired by Jean Seaton

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

The interrogation scene at the end of 1984 is a chilling lesson in torture, its effect on the one being tortured, and its effect on the one doing the torturing. 60 years after Orwell wrote 1984 in the aftermath of the Second World War, torture is again at the forefront at the news agenda. Why does an individual, and why does a state, turn to torture? Can it ever be justified? How surprising is it that in 2009, it is still being conducted, and will it continue? And what else in Orwell's work - notably his concern with the misuse of language - is relevant?
Clare Algar is the Executive Director of Reprieve, which represents prisoners facing execution at the hands of the state both within the conventional criminal justice system and those being tried outside of it. After studying law at Cambridge University and St. Mary's College, London, Clare worked with the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center for 9 months, where she gathered evidence in support of a suit against the State of Mississippi, requiring it to provide legal representation for those on its death row. She then worked for a commercial law firm before joining Reprieve.
Glen Newey is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Keele University. He is currently conducting a research project, ‘Toleration, Terror and Security' at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. His main research interests are in political philosophy, and how the preconditions of politics relate to ethical demands. He has contributed a number of articles to the London Review of Books, including a review of three books dealing with torture (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n02/newe01_.html).
Jean Seaton (Chair) is Director of the Orwell Prize and reports co-editor of Political Quarterly. She is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster, and has written on the history and role of the media in politics, wars, revolutions, religion and childhood. Her books include Power Without Responsibility: the Press and Broadcasting in Britain (with James Curran), Carnage and the Media: the Making and Reporting of News about Violence, and What Can Be Done? Making the Media and Politics Better (with John Lloyd). She is working on the Official History of the BBC between 1974-1987.

Email: julia@publiceye.co.uk / laura@publiceye.co.uk / sarah@publiceye.co.uk

8 June - 4 July 2009
Monday - Saturday at 7.45pm
Thursday & Saturday at 2.45pm

Tickets:
£22.50, £15.00 concessions
£15.00 on Monday evenings

The production is taking part in the Arts Council Scheme ‘A Night Less Ordinary' aimed at providing free tickets for the Under 26's available on the day of each performance.

Trafalgar Studios, Studio 2
14 Whitehall, London SW1A 2DY
Box Office: 0870 060 6632
www.ambassadortickets.com

 

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