Theatre Royal Stratford East
What flutters into your mind when you think of Valentine’s Day? Cards, chocolates, overpriced steak? Or in antithesis Galentines Day? Fuzzy friendship and nothing even remotely resembling a heart? But unless you are a certain brand of political zealot, revolution, dissolution and talking animals aren’t top of the list.
Come the 14th of February, my partner and I, 10 years strong and feeling pretty smug about avoiding all the reruns of The Notebook shuttled underground to Stratford East for the new adaption of George Orwell’s famous beast fable.
If you haven’t read it, shame on you! Go do so now! The allegorical tale published in 1945 spins the yarn of a group of downtrodden animals on Manor Farm. What starts as a glorious wrestle for freedom against a drunken and tyrannical Mr Jones descends into lies, cheating, so much blood, poverty and betrayal. Fun stuff indeed.
In another successful collaboration with Leeds and Nottingham Playhouse, this show is re-ignited for a modern audience by Tatty Hennessy. Focusing more on the idea of inequality over the specific growth of communism Orwell was writing about we have a much less idyllic setting. Hayley Grindle’s set is very much a farm of today, all machines, plastic pens and piping. The farmhouse is a cantilevered glass panel box, with an emergency fire stairwell spiralling down to one side. The conception of freedom, animal rights, accessibility of information and manipulation dreams of weaves together to ground this work in the now, highlighting both Orwell and Henessy’s creative written genius.
Kane Husbands movement and Kate Waters fight director have the two large-scale battles between the animals and the people in thumping techno and drill. Jai Morjaria (lights) and Khalil Madovi (sound) flood the stage with swamping clouds of multicoloured flashes and deafening blasts, like a fight in a club almost. Everything pivots on the idea of an over-industrialised world from the power-snatching pigs in trackies and vests, to the hen Clara in an NHS uniform.
Em Prendergast is possibly the only comic relief and as such we cling to her appearances for dear life. Flapping in (on a scooter) as the pigeon in perfect cockney “You’re not gonna believe this lads” she recounts the gossip of the area, mocking the domesticated animals and their “love for drama”. Elsewhere the calibre is high but stoic. Robin Morrissey is the idealistic Snowball facing off against Tom Simper as a perfectly diabolic Squealer and Tachia Newall: the dictatorial Napoleon providing a vaulting character arch. Now that we have the power-corrupted pigs out of the way, Gabriel Paul is solid and sweet as the gigantic horse boxer and David Nellist is one of the few other literate animals the Donkey. Throughout informing the others on the ever-changing collective’s commandments written on the barn wall. Brydie Service as Clara the hen is heart-breaking, bearing the brunt of the brutality with the least power to fight back. Again and again the subjugated are so often the producers.
This production, like many of director Amy Leach’s has accessibility crafted in its bones. Everal A Walsh as Old Major isn’t on stage for very long, although he certainly makes a lasting impression. But in the wings, every night he describes (live) the action for those who need it via headsets. Along with BSL nights with the interpreter fully in costume, and casting deaf actor Tianah Hodding as Clover, providing a layered reinvention of the lovable horse. These are fantastic additions and for a story about the collective good it makes an important point. However Theatricalising the book is a stretch for any cast, especially without much anthropomorphic help from the costume department. Asking them also to sign, as well as inhabit the body/mind of an animal and effectively characterise proves too much at points.
Around 2001 my mother decided this was an appropriate bedtime story. My brother and I were traumatised, tears quickly followed and we never finished it. Reading it later as a teenager in the mid-2010’s I cried again, this time more aware of the pealing layers within, suffering resonating within my angst ridden brain yet finally able to finish. In 2025 with the spectre Orwell feared rising again in a different form, Animal Farm is never more relevant, especially with such a variegated restaging. Classically I blubbed twice in the second act and launched into a wine-fueled rant against injustice and human nature to my bemused boyfriend on the tube ride home. This play will not only make you sob, it will make you think, pulling the veil from your eyes to reveal the dark heart of reality. So both a recommendation and a caution, life will never be the same again.
If you want a tear stained journey of enlightenment, click HERE!
