It is eerily fitting that a dystopian tale in which books are banned and writers are under threat of having their hands amputated is staged in one of Manchester’s most revered libraries. For the Manchester international festival, Maxine Peake, Sarah Frankcom and Imogen Knight have co-adapted Kay Dick’s recently re-issued 1977 novel to stage within John Rylands Library’s gloomy, grand neogothic interior.
The story, delivered as a dramatised reading by Peake, is of a world in which culture is obliterated by authoritarian forces and artists criminalised. Peake plays a poet who sees horrors unfold around her, and encounters artists who have been punished for their art (painters blinded, musicians made deaf) and those who resist. The nave-like room is the perfect place for the piece, housing such precious tomes as an early manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and a fragment of The Gospel of John, and symbolically infusing books with a sense of the sacred.
