A Clockwork Orange comes to the stage in an eerily prescient adaptation

Margaret Thanos read A Clockwork Orange for the first time last year and saw less an imagined dystopia than a reflection of the world she and her female friends feel they inhabit. That response now shapes her adaptation of Anthony Burgess's novel for Belvoir St Theatre's 2027 season.

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I couldn't help but feel Burgess was not describing some horrific imagined future, but the world I and my female friends feel like we live in right now.

Burgess published the book in 1962, in the shadow of World War II. It follows Alex and his gang of “droogs” as they commit acts of “ultraviolence” in a near-future society. After Alex is convicted of murdering an elderly woman, authorities subject him to an experimental rehabilitation program designed to make him sick at the thought of violence. Stanley Kubrick adapted the novel for film in 1971.

Thanos says society is regressing toward a culture that condones and rewards misogyny, racism and right-wing extremism. She worked in feminist activist spaces in her early 20s, including as an advocate for Plan International's girls' equality program, but became discouraged. “It didn't really matter what we did inside of the feminist movement if we couldn't address the challenges inside of 'boys' club' culture,” she says. She believes the internet has made the problem worse by encouraging people to stop thinking for themselves.

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I do feel like it's getting worse actually, that we're seeing a regression into a culture that not only condones but rewards behaviour of this kind: misogyny, racism, right-wing extremism.

For Thanos, Burgess's central question concerns choice and free will. “If we're not guided by a true sense of obligation to another human being standing in front of us, then we are more easily swayed by the structures of society around us to behave in whatever way we are told to behave,” she says.

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If we're not guided by a true sense of obligation to another human being standing in front of us, then we are more easily swayed by the structures of society around us to behave in whatever way we are told to behave.

Tom Wright, whom Thanos asked to adapt the novel, approached it as a fable about society and the way it deals with its demons. He was particularly attracted to Nadsat, the Russian-influenced language spoken by Alex and his droogs. Wright says the language belongs to an alienated class but also has a celebratory quality. The gang's flamboyant clothes, speech and inner lives make them seem more energetic than the society around them, raising the unsettling possibility that their violence is a response to an uncaring world.

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It's not a story of profound psychology. It's a story about a society and about how a society deals with its demons.