Kate Unwin Animal Farm

 

Times Review – 6^th June 1006

Jeremy Kingston – four stars

 

George Orwell did pigs no favours when he made them the Stalinist villains of his great fable: thuggish, treacherous and focused on their own wellbeing whatever the cost to other species, they end up indistinguishable from humans. There’s a point being made here about humanity itself (more evident in this musical version than in the novel) but Orwell’s chief target was the destruction from within of a dream of utopia on earth.

 

This impressive revival by Stephen Edwards — its first since the National Theatre premiere ten years ago — uses nine professional actors and two teams of 27 performers from the local community theatre (supported by Egg and an award-winning model of its kind). Their presence means that Edwards can fill his wide and soaring stage with a flock of silly sheep, hens in red aprons, pigeons, cows and plodding work-horses. Puppets were ingeniously used at the National but I prefer the effect created here by the live performers. They give a vivid sense of the crowd that populates the farm and, even when its inhabitants have been decimated by purges, survivors are shown fearfully huddling in all corners.

Sir Peter Hall adapted the book, Adrian Mitchell wrote the lyrics, and since Orwell’s story is (in the best sense) didactic, the words sung and spoken here carry greater weight than they need to in most musicals. Hall follows the novel closely, with an up-to-date mention of battery farming at the close, and Mitchell’s lyrics adroitly give us the satire and the sorrow. His familiar verbal wit also gleams through when Bethany Sheldon’s Mollie, the happily bourgeois horse, sings, "I hurry home to the curry comb".

Actually, the show is more a play with music than a true musical, and Richard Peaslee’s score often steers us, like film music, towards changes in mood. These may lead to a ballad or a ridiculous hymn but can swiftly turn into wordless menace or despair.

Kate Unwin’s set is dominated by a gabled farmhouse that revolves to become the fatal windmill, climax of the rivalry between Ben Roberts’s excellent Napoleon and Craig Craig Purnell’s flamboyant Snowball, the first mustachioed like Stalin, the second wearing Trotsky’s wispy beard. Purnell also plays the regime’s poet, and the production’s only serious fault is to have him played for laughs. True tyrannies are not so silly. But otherwise Edwards’s direction makes this a gripping, poignant, strong and swirling show.

 

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