“Animal Farm”, Rose Theatre, Kingston
Simon Jenner in south-west London
February 9, 2025
“To hate all the people your relatives hate— / You’ve got to be carefully taught!” sang Lieutenant Cable bitterly in South Pacific. Hate is key. In an age where memory and misinformation abound, lessons from mid and late twentieth century seem more urgent than ever. Animal Farm arrives at Rose Theatre Kingston from the Bolton Octagon, on the first leg of its tour (until April) directed by Iqbal Khan.
Photo credit: Pamela Raith.
And here’s a work not far from the Two Minutes Hate its author was about to imagine in his next, last work, Nineteen Eighty-Four. George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm was adapted by Ian Wooldridge as far back as 1982, but has remained the standard small-ensemble version, particularly beloved (as was its purpose) by Theatre in Education – that “band of theatrical guerrillas of culture entering schools”, as critic Michael Billington put it in his State of the Nation of 2007.
Though all six actors take main parts, all meld into the ensemble, with some breathtaking moments of stillness amidst the stage bustle. Animal Farm is different to much of Orwell: here his compassionate socialism finds gentleness, lament and empathy for those oppressed. There is a unique melancholy to this work that is brought out here.
It’s an adaptation spurred by an earlier fear of totalitarianism, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, quite likely Third World War, bullish U.S. confrontation and loss of Britain’s post-war consensus. Wooldridge’s innovative approach – multi-roling, simplicity of means – owns a Brechtian purpose (there is irony there) and a freshness that is still punchy and exhilarating. Partly owing to Orwell’s style here, Wooldridge uses much of the original dialogue, and rarely has to paraphrase.
This production takes on hints from Warhorse; animal heads are outlined in wooden sculptural form like a Naum Gabo sculpture turned inside-out in Su Newell’s semi-puppetry and undistracting overall costumes. Ciaran Bagnall’s set and lighting pay homage to this; corrugated iron slats are illuminated with fluorescent scrawls; the slats get daubed updates on wooden boards later on. His lighting, predominantly green, cleverly invokes jerrybuilding on a slick scale: rigs and provisionality sometimes ascend to holy theatre as in the opening.
This is where Natalia Campbell’s Old Major prophesies a Utopia in her ‘Beasts of England’ speech and song (music composed by Dylan Towley, also music director), haloed in pale blue sepulchral light. It’s fitting Campbell, from such ardent even raucously youthful tones, then takes on the cow Clover, sad witness to disillusion alongside the oldest animal, donkey Benjamin. Benjamin remembers everything, here taken by Soroosh Lavasani, who earlier plays Trotsky figure Snowball: the dangerous visionary pig whose eloquence and genuine desire to see living conditions improved finds its metaphor in the windmill.
Orwell’s bleak fairy tale maps the Russian revolution closely. Simplifying its profile, it shows too how even this simple-sloganed parable features political actors prepared to simplify further to gestural grunts. The reduction of language, removing all forms of dissent by taking the very means of expressing them, are more than embryonic here. As is much else. You could easily go Nineteen Eighty-Four-spotting in Animal Farm, but it’s worth relishing its difference too.
Photo credit: Pamela Raith.
There is a metaphysical reach in Benjamin for instance. He might have lived through many revolutions, old as Methuselah. “Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.” Lavasani wails late but wails long in his quiet sidelong assertion that nothing changes, everything remains bad. But never pitched loud enough to attract the authorities. At the end here, even Lavasani partially collapses. It’s a long haul from his strutting Snowball, ardent and genuinely revolutionary (something that can’t be tolerated), which is why Snowball has to go.
There’s good supporting work by Sam Black’s carthorse Boxer, a burling Scottish take on the simple-minded, wholly sincere son of the revolution, with a hint of Robbie Coltrane about him. “If Napoleon says it, it must be right” turns from his paean to his death knell. Though even here it takes a long time for him to relinquish faith in Snowball’s heroism at the Battle of the Cowshed, where the two share the animals’ newly instituted Animal Hero, First Class award. Benjamin is dismayed at Boxer’s gullibility, though of course never surprised. He plans to retire somewhere with Boxer, but events conspire in a way that is even worse than he prophesies – though he is quickest to see the pigs’ purposes.
Olivia Chandler has much early work as Mollie, the vain horse who enjoys genteel servitude and eventually escapes. But in Chandler’s hands we are reminded that like Benjamin and to an extent Clover, she sees more clearly than most: Mollie owns more than a self-interested eye for new privileges reduced. And though Mollie can’t read as much as she pretends, her critique and apostasy is based at least partly on a realization that things won’t improve and that her best course lies elsewhere. It’s a moment of history worth teasing out: those bourgeois who leave the Revolution in the 1920s having been relatively enthusiastic but not convinced.
Chandler like others takes on some wonderful ensemble moments: as with the chickens and barnyard sounds, a real coup de théâtre. Khan’s team morph through noise and movement (Shelley Eva Haden’s cleverly sinewy mimicry never over-emphasized). Latterly Chandler takes on the crow Moses (with a crow’s head perched atop like a racing helmet), swooping in and out and occasionally letting the worm out of the beak. Luckily Moses can be traduced.
The two chief Porkers have to deliver, and they do latterly on stilts (Alex Andersen is a specialist consultant on this, and it’s a boggling moment or two). Lewis Griffin’s Squealer is a delight of improvisatory lying, particularly when cornered. Griffin literally projects the ticking of the mis-informer’s mind as he ratchets up the fact that the pigs’ ruses have been partly found out. Griffin relishes glib quick thinking.
The doublethink we know and loathe from Nineteen Eighty-Four is instinct here as in the way the slogans are altered. Not just the infamous “… but some are more equal than others” but about beds “with sheets” or alcohol “to excess” and most chillingly “no animal shall kill another animal” trashed by the meaninglessly wide “without cause”. Gerry Marsden’s sound design is never so neatly effective as here, as when ten animals confessing hysterically in a show trial are executed with brief electrocution as at an abattoir.
That comes after Snowball is chased off by dogs (the scene is not shown and dogs are sensibly excluded with no loss here). Snowball’s proposal of a windmill that Napoleon (suggestive of Stalin) initially derides, is instituted. It’s later destroyed too, to create a precedent for enforcing discipline and killing ‘traitors’ who never existed. And Snowball is ‘revealed’ by Squealer with ‘documents’ to have been in league with their former owner, Mr Jones, all along.
There is a coup with Townley’s creation of a terrible one-note new anthem to replace the overly-stirring “Beasts of England”, sung by Chandler. And the apotheosis with humans is realized by using upper gantries that are only adopted at this stage. Height here, the stretch of “Two legs better …” takes on a physical oppression. This production realizes more than the original Animal Farm; it prefigures Nineteen Eighty-Four and other dystopias too. But the tenderness and regret remain as Clover and Benjamin virtually collapse in a lament for the lack of humanity in pigs and humans.
The end of Khan’s and Bolton Octagon’s production is moving for its sharp economy of gesture in the oppressed. Its quiet nobility counterpoints the cartoonish, buffoon-like strut of pigs carousing with human voices created by microphones around them. Moving and rousing by turns, Khan’s forces ensure in Benjamin’s crumpled despair (not in the book, but wholly justified), that it’s not lost.
At a time when bleak governments offer no hope but endless exploitation, this parable might be timely if it didn’t seem perennial. Each generation though must learn it before it too, is banned. Poet, novelist and critic John Wain once quoted a critic of Orwell that he was a thorn in the side of such governments. He riposted: “May he stay there forever!”
If there is a way to prevent a dystopian future, imagine it first. Manifesting an evil might just prevent it from happening. Orwell manages it twice. First as a parable of what had happened, then as a warning for its consummation. We might have to play whack-a-mole with so many possible dystopias, to prevent each in turn. Orwell teaches us we must go on doing so.
