SHOULD you not have access to the programme before seeing Headlong’s “radical new staging” of 1984, you should note that “paying close attention to the appendix led co-creators Duncan Macmillan and Robert Icke to rip up the theatrical rule book”.

George Orwell’s appendix is written from the perspective of 2050, looking back at his vision of tomorrow’s surveillance-bedevilled world in 1984 as he forewarned in 1948. This explains a group of earnest types discussing 1984 in the presence of Matthew Spencer’s Winston Smith, the rebellious Comrade 6079.

At first they strike you as a particularly enthusiastic book club, but equipped with intrusive mobile phones and itchy fingers, they become ever more sinister in the elliptical, claustrophobic structure of Headlong’s production. One of them makes the most telling point of all, that whenever you read 1984, it will always be a vision of the future, just beyond where we are now.

The date is not significant in itself; Orwell flipped the 8 and the 4 in the year it was written. What is perennially significant is the worst of our human characteristics and how these can be exacerbated by the technology we invent to enforce or reinforce them or curb them.

Orwell was a perceptive judge of those failings, failings that echo down the ages. 1984 is therefore as much about the present as the future; after all, the torture techniques in Room 101 are old-school, while Orwell’s concepts of double-speak and the Thought Police have become ever more apposite in our time of “spin” and political correctness.

What Headlong’s production does do, aside from completing the rare feat of putting an appendix back in, is to emphasise the role of technology in a 21st century of increasing surveillance, identity and identity theft and life as a number (for entry codes/passwords, etc).

Multimedia productions have sometimes been guilty of swamping theatre with innovation to the detriment of the older art form. Here, however, that is exactly what should happen because Big Brother is watching you. Icke and Macmillan achieve just the right balance between text and technology: what’s going on inside Winston’s head as he writes his rebellious diary and what is going on all around him, having its corrosive impact on his head and his sense of truth.

Chloe Lamford’s stage and costume design could not be more Orwellian; what makes this 1984 a piece for 2014 is the impact of Natasha Chivers’s flashing lighting; the shuddering sound designs of Tom Gibbons that threaten to shake your teeth from their sockets; and the video designs of Tim Reid that emphasise how nothing will escape Big Brother. Put it altogether and it is disorientating as it should be. Lamford’s stage changes spectacularly too, a dazzling coup de theatre in its own right.

Amid the oppressive technology, however, this is a human tale and Headlong’s production is driven by humanity versus inhumanity, built around the issue of identity and the loss of it. Spencer and Janine Harouni as his “lover” Julia are as much victims of circumstance as Romeo and Juliet are in Shakespeare’s play.

1984, York Theatre Royal, 7.30pm tonight and 2.30pm, 7.30pm tomorrow. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk