REVIEW: A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange

Eden Court, Inverness

* * * *

A Clockwork Orange was proper stop-you-in-your-tracks drama with killing, raping, mild torture and violence – not always the easiest things to watch.

But that’s the way Anthony Burgess wrote his book.

And director of the Action To The Word company, Alexandra Spencer-Jones, had created a stage version that faithfully played out the story of “little Alex”.

The anti-hero’s journey from young gang leader through state brainwashing forces an audience to ask whether being bad is worse than being forced to be good. And can you really change a person?

In the show at Eden Court last week, from the moment Alex and his gang of “droogs” or friends swaggered into the theatre making their way slowly and menacingly to the stage, you had a sense of fear.

Quickly the alienating effect of the gangspeak of Nadsat – their half-Russian, half English slang – left you grappling for meaning.

But using dance to graphically play out scenes helped.

And the director’s sharp ear for music translated Alex’s love in the book for the “gorgeosity” of classical music into something wider. We feel the tragedy of his later inability to listen to it: “And if I even slosh it, lovely music, I sick up.”

The soundtrack went from Beethoven’s Fifth symphony which came with violence, to Scissor Sisters’ version of Eurythmics’ Beethoven (I Love To Listen To), to make it more contemporary.

Alexandra’s own youthful choice of “gorgeosity”, the band Placebo provided Battle For The Sun – and the lead

Burgess’s story of Alex who moves on from beating up gang rival Billy Boy to raping and the murder of an old woman or “ptitsa” to being the first guinea-pig for the Ludovico Technique of aversion therapy, is all-action.

It suits the scenes in prison when Alex’s last bout of violence convinces you he’s what the sinister Mr Deltoid called “villainy incarnate”.

it’s good to have him using his body as well as Burgess’s words to play out the big themes, human freedom, right v wrong, education v human nature.

But the words, describing the terrible things he is being forced to watch, allowed your imagination to fill in the pictures as Alex with his eyes stretched open by the scientists’ hands looks out at us, appalled.

Adam Search played the anti-hero with just enough sympathy to keep us onside, even when Alex’s violence erupted.

Watching as recovered, pitiful Alex gradually rediscovered some of his original staring-eyed demonic self again, once the brainwashing wore off, admitting he’d love to pull the feathers out of peacocks, was to see a second transformation just as unsettling as the first.

Played straight through with no interval, the play-dance piece was powerful theatre you had to work hard to keep up with.

The violence, rape and masturbation may have tested the boundaries of the audience, but kept the piece true to the original book without venturing as far as Stanley Kubrick’s movie.