The Year of the Rat

Synopsis

Isolated on a Scottish island in 1948 George Orwell is attempting to finish his last masterpiece -Nineteen Eighty Four - before ill health forces him off the island. Holed up with a shotgun and literary circle bombshell Sonia Brownell for company he’s desperately hoping for a last chance at happiness. But George is no womaniser and is sure to make a hash of things particularly after his childhood friend and notorious letch Cyril Connolly turns up. With his only ally being Boxer, the cart-horse from Animal Farm, will he seduce Sonia or will Cyril scupper his plans? Can he survive his friends, both real and imaginary, and finish his masterpiece before death comes knocking?

Our Review:

18 March 2008

The clock strikes thirteen, then the lights rise dimly on George Orwell tapping away at his typewriter in a spacious, but shabby, recreation of the cottage on Jura where he wrote much of 1984. The opening of Roy Smiles’ The Year of the Rat prepares us for a play that will merge fact and fantasy, use Orwell’s fiction to inform his life and vice versa, and re-create the novelist’s almost final days.

So it does, but the promise of the opening is not always fulfilled. Smiles is clearly devoted to Orwell, but The Year of the Rat hints at three different plays and ends up not quite being any of them. Orwell is joined on Jura in 1949 by friend/editor of Horizon, Cyril Connolly, and Sonia Brownell, the editorial assistant Orwell is attempting to seduce or marry – historically, they did marry on his death-bed. Their presence leads to an exploration of love, loneliness, envy, genius and despair, plus a fair chunk o...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

No reviews yet

Click here to add your review