Animal Farm at Bolton Octagon Theatre and on tour – review

Where does the animal end and the human begin? It’s hard to say, in Iqbal Khan’s production of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It initially appears all in the mind, the cast visibly human apart from animal heads on top of their own. But as they move, the rest of their bodies seem made of animal spines and limbs – even fingers are tucked to form hooves and trotters.

It’s a disturbing opening. The cast squeeze out of pens and slowly clamber over each other, glaring at the audience, noses in the air, as though smelling blood. They make a cacophony of guttural howls, squeals and screeches that you might hear at a slaughterhouse.

Ciarán Bagnall’s design also creates an abattoir. The animal headwear is suspended from the ceiling like decapitated heads. Industrial white light filters through smoke and corrugated iron doors. When the animals later hoist up the windmill, like a crucifix, its blades also resemble those of a factory meat mincer.

The animal costumes are equally arresting. Not furry – no fur at all – but sinews and arteries wound into animal shapes. They’re crucially also not masks but more tribal headwear, conferring status – one sequence even sees the head of a pig, chief in this animal kingdom, placed on an actor like a crown.

Ida Regan and Killian Macardle overemphasise the duplicity and insincerity of de facto rulers Napoleon and Squealer. Regan’s light, sweet tone suggests artificiality and untrustworthiness, but feels weak without something sinister to convince us that her authority won’t be challenged.

There’s an irony in the understatedness of Orwell’s title that Khan’s production overplays. The constant levity butchers the creeping sense of manipulation, coercion and psychological control. It instead becomes about stupidity, the lowly animals laughed at for being dumb, without unease about them being duped. Each time a commandment is altered by the self-serving pigs, it’s met with laughter – a comic moment that presents the other animals as fools. A menagerie of accents relies on lazy stereotypes, for example, where Brummie signifies dimness and gullibility.

But the point isn’t that they’re too dim to see; it’s that they’re unable to see. Their dependence on the other animals’ ability to read is what’s exploited. Bagnall’s design understands that, writing the commandments in UV paint on the doors – half-visible and able to be illuminated or concealed.

Despite the occasional sounds of scraping metal or strings, there’s a lack of tension and sense of events spiralling and intensifying. Ian Woolridge’s adaptation doesn’t give a dramatic structure to the narrative, so it remains feeling like chapters. Scenes seem to reset then effectively replay.

Where Orwell raises indistinguishability between animal and human, here there’s more inconsistency. The actors offer an animal noise or gesture when they remember to. Without purpose, all the whinnying, spluttering and cheek-wobbling becomes ridiculous by the end.

However, there’s a subtle transition in the pigs’ movement where they become more upright and two-legged, eventually entering on stilts like deformed hybrids. Moments of Orwellian dread, but not a barnstorming Orwell adaptation.