Theatre Review: Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange @ Soho Theatre

(There’s a review further down but I couldn’t resist a pre-ramble)

Vice

Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress is a morality tale charting the brief rise and subsequent fall of Tom Rakewell, due to his scandalous lifestyle. Rakewell inherits a fortune from his rich father, moves to London and his subsequent profligacy and debauchery leads him first to prison and eventually to a crazed death in an asylum. Clockwork Orange forms an updated version of this story. Our rake, Alex, is worse than Hogarth’s, obsessed with violence and rape but follows a similar path, towards censure and prison. By way of a change, he is offered freedom in exchange for taking part in a scientific process that will give him a permanent horror of sex and violence and leave him unable to re-offend.

The hero rejects moral decision-making and the simple chain of moral cause-and-effect is replaced with a more complex question: is it acceptable to contain dangerous behaviour by turning someone into an automaton, a Clockwork Orange? As far as society is concerned, Alex has become a better, more peaceful citizen having undergone a complete reform and the prison system is freed from the burden of housing him. If every criminal received this treatment we would have a crime-free society. The scientist in the story suggests that the process simply instils the natural horror of violence present in most people; if that is the case then Alex has been improved and not harmed. From a utilitarian point of view this is an open-and-shut case.

The opposing view comes from the prison chaplain. He says that choice is important; an argument for free will. Alex hasn’t made a choice to lead a better life so hasn’t been reformed. He’s saying that we should be free to make bad decisions, and to bear the consequences of them. He hopes that through life experience we can learn to improve ourselves morally. His argument owes a lot to Christian dogma, we save ourselves by choosing the right path, but it has broader value if we see freedom and self-determination as fundamental goods and human rights.

Perhaps the joke’s on the chaplain: he works in an institution that functions to remove inmates’ opportunity to offend in the same way as the scientific process. It is a blunt instrument defending society from anti-social individuals by removing their freedom. He places faith in the system’s ability to reform but given Alex’s violent and calculating nature, that doesn’t seem like a possibility.

Anthony Burgess’s novel eventually arrives at redemption, justifying the chaplain’s beliefs. Alex tires of violence and settles into a peaceful life. However, this ending did not find favour with his American publishers who cut the final chapter leaving Alex as an unreformed, brutal sociopath at-large, thinking that would sit better with their audience. Stanley Kubrick followed form with his 1971 film, stating that Alex’s change of heart was inconsistent with the rest of the novel. Perhaps he anticipated the moral outrage caused by his visually shocking film would be blunted by such a tame resolution; it’s well-known that controversial material sells. Whether or not the original author should have control over his artistic creation is a whole different debate but given the high re-offence rate of released criminals, which ending rings truer as a reflection of society?

I’m not a big consumer of science fiction but I think the genre is at its best when it postulates technologies that raise new moral and social issues. Roald Dahl did this really well in stories like ‘The Sound Machine’ and ‘William and Mary’. With Clockwork Orange Burgess created a thought-experiment* that raises some interesting questions about crime, punishment and the value of free will.

AND NOW AN ACTUAL REVIEW..

I thought this was a superb production, cleverly balancing high-camp with brutal menace. Martin McCreadie as Alex did well to create a convincing persona in the lead part with Malcolm McDowell’s considerable shadow looming over him; I assume the Yorkshire accent was retained by way of tribute. He was quite magnetic as the strong-arm gang-leader, eloquently expressing his delight in violence and Baroque music. Particularly impressive, also, was Stephen Spencer’s double turn as the contrasting Neanderthal thug ‘Dim’ and self-serving politician ‘Minister of the Inferior’.

Fantastic, flamboyant movement was used to bring out the gang’s amoral delight in violence and the show was visually stark with the palette limited to black, white and orange. The Nadsat vocabulary worked brilliantly on stage, defining the gang by its language and trivialising its unpleasant activities; the cast did well to make it sound real.

*This double-meaning was the point of the whole section. Sorry.