Review: Animal Farm
October 23, 2008
Date reviewed: 23rd October 2008
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
Animal Farm isn’t a great book in spite of being a plain-speaking one; it’s a great book partly because it is so forthright and precise. From Orwell’s perspective, it would only have hindered his aim to have made his analogies opaque, while, from the reader’s, its cutting humour is mainly a result of the doggedness with which the plot tails (no pun etc) events during and following the Russian Revolution.
Sir Peter Hall’s 1984 adaptation self-consciously adopts a “no fixing” policy, which, considering that virtually no-one considered it broken (or has since), can’t have been a bad move. Far from aiming to peg nuances onto a novella whose bite consists in simplicity, it is a devoted but workmanlike genre conversion, albeit with emphasis given to certain phrases and themes by the addition of songs written by Adrian Mitchell and Richard Peaslee.
Director Nikolai Foster had been keen to stress that his production would observe the same spirit of diligent deference before it opened. He had implied that it would be a meaty rendition of the great satirist’s iconic yarn, to which end the Quarry theatre’s stage had been gutted, clearing the way for a visually thundering set.
He was right. The bumpy planks clambering all over the walls that stretch from the edges of the stage alongside the peripheral seats, along with a slightly jaded looking Union Jack, tell of a farm already suffering the effects of agricultural hubris when the play begins. The large surface of the stage’s back wall serves alternately as the farmhouse, with a raised window through which authority in its various forms reveals its will and kindly explains its rationale, and a display of the seven principles of Animalism in their varying degrees of editorial leniency. This all partners the fraternal music admirably, especially considering that the instruments blend into supposed farmland much better than objects like pianos and double basses ought to.
It’s all well acted, especially by those playing the key figures in pork’s rise to hegemony. Jeff Hordley conveys the “practical pig” Napoleon’s grit forcefully, and Ian Conningham’s Squealer is a grubby salesman smugly delivering the regime’s self-justifications. Moreover, although he is not one of the cast’s stronger singers, the dedication that Nick Shorney shows to mimicking the mannerisms of a horse is practically heroic – it looks like a surreal reversal of that much-caricatured image, humans in a horse costume (albeit with only the one horse occupying the human costume). Karen Mann also captures the pathos of the noble horse Clover’s failure to recall the original tenets of Animalism, accompanied by her conviction that they might have been subverted.
Foster, on the other hand, drives home the novel’s overriding mood: the gradual replacement of idealistic optimism with an atmosphere of underlying menace occasionally brought into the foreground whenever the regime sees a need to claim scalps as scapegoats or neuter any questioning voices. This is surely a sensible approach to directing it for audiences that will have far fewer memories of the targets of the book’s swipes than those that watched the original production.
-Simon Walker
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