ANIMAL FARM. To 30 August.
Oxford.
ANIMAL FARM
by George Orwell adapted by Ian Wooldridge.
Creation Theatre Company Oxford Castle Garden Stage To 30 August 2008.
Mon-Sat 6pm.
Runs 1hr 15min No interval.
TICKETS: 01865 766266.
www.creationtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 30 July.
An evening of fascinating menace on the prison-farm.
This adaptation of George Orwell’s political parable is best known from Alan Lyddiard’s mud-floored physical production toured by Northern Stage some years ago.
Joanna Read’s open-air production is on a smaller, perhaps tamer scale. But it still makes its point. True, the Windmill’s so far to one side that it can be hard to notice it’s falling-down. And the doubling means the ousted Snowball isn’t completely established in the mind to be recalled at subsequent references to his treachery.
Yet Read is aware of time moving on. The programme carries a key to the Soviet equivalents for the characters, something clear to most audiences till recent decades, and appallingly real to Orwell’s late-1940s readers; those who sympathised with his previous attacks on western society must have found the anti-Stalin thrust astounding.
Read frames the action by having Farmer Jones as a prison-guard with rifle, sorting out the prisoners, men and women only allowed together for the time they play out a freedom of ideas through this story (aptly; the performance area was once a prison exercise-yard).
And the capitalist Pilkington with whom the rebel pigs, now the farm dictators, profitably trade is here a sleek, red-dressed female, with a vision of turning a farm-building into a chic hotel. It’s an apt addition; the rush of western chequebooks to exploit post-communist Russia is well reflected in this smartly confident female capitalist. She represents a society where equality between sexes does nothing for general equality. Ms Pilkington approves the way these totalitarian pigs work their fellow-creatures harder than anywhere else.
Other modern elements seem more gratuitous – sound equipment, mobile ‘phone. But they do no harm, and perhaps help suggest Orwell’s parable still has force.
There’s plenty of animalism too, with suggestive movement and vocal sounds. Angus Brown’s thuggish-looking, threatening-sounding Napoleon is a terrifying creature. As his propagandist Squealer, justifying every inequality, rewriting the rules to fit his master’s wishes, Tomos James is ever-smiling in plausibly distorting the truth. And amid a strong cast Victoria Gee’s puzzled questions and looks of incomprehension give a clear farmyard-level perspective about the way things are going.
Napoleon: Angus Brown.
Clover/Dog/Sheep: Victoria Gee.
Boxer/Major: James Hogg.
Squealer: Tomos James.
Snowball/Benjamin: Adam Newsome.
Mollie/Pilkington/Moses: Naomi Said.
Director: Joanna Read.
Designer: Nancy Surman.
Movement: Johnny Hoskins.
2008-07-31 08:57:34