Christine Mackie: “Hope Is A Human Quality - And We Have To Defend it”

“Kindness and creativity” is Christine Mackie’s manifesto. “If I ever have a tattoo,” she says, “it’ll be that.” She laughs, but she means it. By the end of our conversation, the phrase feels like more than a lovely line: it is the key to how Mackie sees theatre, the North, and the strange, urgent power of Orwell’s 1984.

Mackie is appearing in Lost In Transit Theatre’s new stage adaptation of 1984, which is at The Edge Theatre and Arts Centre, Chorlton 21-26 April, before heading to Rochdale on Friday 8 May as part of Touchstones Live and the University of Sheffield's Drama Studio on 12 May, for this vital company's northern spring 2026 tour. The Manchester-based collective describe their work as “disobedient storytelling”, reimagining classic texts through ensemble-led performance, inventive staging and a strong audio-visual language.

That spirit clearly appeals to her. “I said to James, my husband…‘disobedient theatre, James, I want some of that,’” she says. It is a line that tells you a lot about Mackie: still hungry for challenge, still open to risk, still excited by theatre that does not arrive “tied up with a bow at the top”.

This time, she is stepping into O’Brien - and not as a straightforward villain. “It’s a very interesting decision…to make O’Brien a woman, for a start,” Mackie says. What interests her is not playing the Party enforcer as some abstract monster, but making her recognisably human. “There is no reason why she should not herself…have been subject to what is happening to other people,” she says. “She’s not separate to people.”

That complexity matters. Mackie is keen to avoid making O’Brien “cartoon-like and a kind of Bond villain”. Instead, she sees somebody who has endured the system, survived it, and risen within it - someone who recognises something in Winston even as she breaks him. She talks about the character having the quality of “a teacher, or a headmaster”, a figure able to “get what they want by how they speak”. In Mackie’s reading, power is not always loud. Sometimes it is calm, measured, reasonable - and all the more chilling for it.

That idea has shaped the role vocally as much as psychologically. Mackie says she has enjoyed exploring O’Brien’s ability to “modulate and play and appear to be softer” when there is no overt physical threat. “We’re used to messages being delivered, aren’t we?” she says. “Sometimes we’re listening to a lot that are very bombastic at the moment, and you actually crave for somebody to just…just speak and explain.” It is a striking way into the character, and into the world of 1984 itself: persuasion as control, tone as weapon, authority wrapped in reassurance.

Orwell, she says, now feels less like prophecy than lived reality. “We’re living with something which is very current and pertinent.” The language of the novel has bled into everyday conversation - “Big Brother”, “Newspeak”, “fake news” - but for Mackie the story’s deepest force lies not only in surveillance or political control. It lies in the human need to speak freely. “There’s a craving in the play,” she says, “certainly from Winston and from Julia, to be able to speak like somebody who isn’t being checked.”

That sense of urgency sits at the heart of Lost In Transit’s production too. The company says its adaptation places humanity at the centre of the story, asking how far a person can be pushed before betraying those they love. Director Jonny Cordingley has said that what is striking about 1984 now is that it no longer feels like “distant dystopian fiction”, and that this version strips the narrative back to “the human level”.

Mackie responds to that same impulse. For all the darkness of Orwell’s world, she keeps returning to connection, shared feeling, and the role theatre plays in both. “I’m an optimist,” she says. “Love can see you through.” She talks about the audience caring “hugely” about what is happening on stage, and about the basic act of theatre as “standing in somebody else’s shoes”. That is what she wants people to feel here: not simply the cold architecture of a dystopia, but the cost of it on actual lives.

And yet she is clear that this production is not merely an endurance test. “I don’t feel it’s grim and horrible,” she says, because “it’s theatre, so there is theatricality, there is a way of telling”. She speaks with real admiration for Lost In Transit’s ensemble approach - the speed of the transitions, the physical storytelling, the sense that everybody is helping to build a world from ordinary materials. “It sure does make you invest,” she says. “Everybody’s trying to make a world out of what they’ve got.”

She also sounds invigorated by the process itself. After decades in the business, Mackie is still animated by rehearsal rooms and collective playmaking. “It’s a fantastic role… for a woman of my age to play,” she says, and she feels “very, very fortunate” to be doing it with “an absolutely phenomenal company”. The physical demands are real - “an age thing for me”, as she puts it, laughing - but so is the thrill. “To actually be so physically involved in the telling and making of this story has been thrilling.”

That enthusiasm extends beyond 1984 into a broader conversation about theatre-making in the North. Mackie is candid about the pressures artists are under and the difficulty of earning a living from creative work. She urges audiences to support “new writing, support new companies, because it’s hard out there. It’s really, really tough.” At the same time, she speaks with enormous gratitude for the communities that continue to make work happen: rehearsal spaces full of “everyday creativity and kindness”, people who say “let’s do it”, artists who build opportunities for one another.

That matters particularly in regional theatre, which she sees as both culturally vital and rich with possibility. “A Northern Identity has always been one which is rich in storytelling,” she says. There is real pride in the way she talks about work being made in Manchester, Yorkshire and Lancashire, and in northern companies taking that work elsewhere without apology. “We should be saying, come on, come on, come on. Look what we can do.”

Her argument becomes even more passionate when the conversation turns to education. If there is one change she would make, she says, it would be to “bring drama back into schools”. Not simply school productions or musicals, but “drama for drama’s sake” - the classroom space where young people learn empathy, listening, and how to understand another person’s position. She talks about drama’s “transferable skills”, its “listening skills” and “humanities skills”, and the way it helps build emotional intelligence. In Mackie’s telling, theatre is not a luxury add-on. It is part of how we learn to be with one another.

That is perhaps why her closing thoughts on 1984 land with such force. What does she hope audiences carry out with them? First, surprise: “I haven’t seen anything like that.” She wants them thrilled by the physical and visual language of the production, by the feeling that this is not a dutiful revival but something alive and immediate. But beyond that, she wants a heightened awareness - of what they are hearing, reading, “doomscrolling”, and of how language is being used around them. Most of all, though, she wants them to “look for the opportunities of hope” and “look for those opportunities for connection.”

For all the machinery of fear in Orwell’s world, Mackie refuses to surrender that idea. “Hope is a human quality,” she says. “We shouldn’t lose it. And we have to defend it.” Coming from an actor still so visibly committed to serious theatre, to northern creativity, and to the human value of stories, it sounds less like a neat closing line than a call to arms.

Tour dates:

21-26 April. The Edge Theatre and Arts Centre, Chorlton

8 May. Touchstones LIVE. The Ukrainian Centre, Rochdale

12 May. Drama Studio, University of Sheffield