The event on 6 June is part of UCL’s Festival of Culture and will be live streamed, as well as filmed by the award-winning artist and film director Edwin Mingard. Once again the readings and performances will take place inside Senate House, London University’s landmark building and the architectural inspiration for Orwell’s looming Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This performance featured readings from Dame Harriet Walter, Simon Schama, Frances Barber, Melvyn Bragg, Billy Bragg and David Olusoga, among many others, and was streamed online by a worldwide audience of tens of thousands. It is to be a tale of two cities put together by Libby Brodie Productions, which collaborated with the Orwell Foundation for last year’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Live event – a start-to-finish reading of the book in a single day by a collection of actors, writers and members of the public. Orwell’s original words, coupled with those of today’s homeless people, will be read by a mix of leading actors, artists, politicians and campaigners throughout one whole day under the direction of Hannah Price, who said this weekend she feels honoured to be using Orwell’s thoughts as “the backbone of an immersive performance that places the shocking rise of homelessness at its centre”. “The idea is to use Orwell as he would want, to build a better understanding of modern poverty and build support to solve homelessness.” “Now low pay, insecure work, high housing costs, debt and insufficient benefits are pushing people to the brink,” said the Rowntree foundation’s chief executive, Campbell Robb.

But we are ashamed that it is so necessary,” said Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell Foundation, which has joined forces with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to run the event as a response to growing levels of homelessness in both capitals. “It is thrilling to be able to connect to our colleagues in Paris in this joint creative and intellectual piece of work. The planned immersive performance of readings from Orwell’s book and from other key works, including his essay The Spike and his novel A Clergyman’s Daughter, is to take place first in London and then in Paris, accompanied by modern testimony from refugees and rough sleepers and by poetry, musical performances and panel discussions. Leading actors and writers will gather in tribute to the great English author’s brave attempt to understand homelessness and poverty. This summer the influential ideas contained in Orwell’s first published book are to be turned into a one-off live theatrical event staged in both cities.

George orwell down and out in paris