It\u2019s easy to forget that George Orwell\u2019s Animal Farm is a chillingly forensic examination of the architectures of authoritarianism, maybe because the animals are cute. It wasn\u2019t written for children but it does have the thrust and power of the fairytale, so that kids can understand its cataclysmic message even if much of the allegory is lost.<\/p>\n
But allegory is Orwell\u2019s central game here, and any adaptation of the work needs to wrestle with the events of the Russian revolution and its subsequent slide into despotism before it refracts, transposes or updates the story for contemporary audiences. We can never be allowed to forget that the events Orwell warns us about really happened, not to animals on a farm but to an entire people. If we don\u2019t, we\u2019re doomed to repeat it.<\/p>\n
According to self-devised theatre company Bloomshed, we may be doomed to repeat it anyway. There is a kind of world-weary inevitability about their adaptation of Orwell\u2019s story, as if things couldn\u2019t turn out any other way. Maybe it\u2019s the speed and telescoping; events happen so quickly, systems enforced and discarded in the blink of an eye, we don\u2019t get time to contemplate or weigh consequences. It\u2019s that rare thing in the theatre: a one-hour show that could easily, and probably should, have been longer.<\/p>\n
\u2018Bloomshed play it like a scattergun massacre with superfluous dance numbers.\u2019 Photograph: Sarah Walker<\/p>\n
It opens with a man squeezing a rubber chicken, followed by a faux-Werner Herzog monologue about the enormity of a chicken\u2019s stupidity; it establishes a subversive, winking mood that the company admirably sustain throughout. We are quickly thrust into revolution, as farmer Jones (Sam Nix) is overthrown by the animals, led by the pigs Snowball (Laura Aldous, excellent) and Napoleon (Elizabeth Brennan, in a performance of great sway and swagger).<\/p>\n
Syd Brisbane is superbly cast as the indefatigable cart-horse Boxer, and Lauren Swain is also excellent as the oleaginous politician Squealer. Anna Louey is perfect as Mollie, the little filly who struggles with the new edict banning ribbons, and Edan Goodall has enormous fun with a chicken called Bon-Bon (potentially the one mentioned in Herzog\u2019s opening monologue). The cast are uniformly excellent clowns all performing at speed, and it\u2019s a joy to watch.<\/p>\n
Less assured is the plotting. So many of Orwell\u2019s effects are tied up in the meticulousness of his clockwork plot, which ratchets up tension and horror with every minor betrayal and altercation. The disaster is a slowly encroaching frost flecked with occasional violence, but Bloomshed play it like a scattergun massacre with superfluous dance numbers. It\u2019s often riotously fun, but key narrative beats \u2013 the seven commandments, the writing of them down and the breaking of them one by one, for example \u2013 are either lost or obscured along the way. The result is less disquieting and resonant than it might have been.<\/p>\n
\u2018Syd Brisbane is superbly cast as the indefatigable cart-horse Boxer.\u2019 Photograph: Sarah Walker<\/p>\n
Refracting classic works through a contemporary Australian lens is Bloomshed\u2019s defining feature, as they showed recently in their production of Pride and Prejudice, which cleverly depicted Regency England through the lens of Australia\u2019s housing crisis. Animal Farm is a less obvious vehicle for transposition \u2013 its themes too monstrous and its historical significance too overwhelming, perhaps \u2013 so the local references feel shoehorned and slightly petty. The production works best when it cleaves to Orwell\u2019s original design, as in a scene of political purging involving confetti cannons that is as awful as it is hilarious.<\/p>\n
The creative director, James Jackson, builds a rowdy, capricious atmosphere full of masks and pratfalls and the cast throw themselves into it with vigour and fortitude. The sense of chaos is genuine, but there\u2019s also precision and control in the comic performances \u2013 the anthropomorphising, the shifts from silliness to savagery \u2013 that ranks with the best clowning in the country. Nathan Burmeister\u2019s versatile set suggests the slaughterhouse and the penthouse simultaneously, lit ingeniously by John Collopy, and the whole thing bops along to a jazzy score by Justin Gardam.<\/p>\n
What of Orwell\u2019s allegory? Does it matter that all of the historical references, Trotsky and Lenin, the Bolshevik Revolution and the purges and show trials of Stalin, white Russians and the proletariat, are washed away? It\u2019s a loss, and it flattens or takes the sting out of the work a little, but there are gains too. A searing final monologue from Brisbane makes explicit the idea that we\u2019re already living under despots, enslaved and miserable while billionaires turn into trillionaires and the resources run dry. Sounds Orwellian to me.<\/p>\n