Turning George Orwell's farmyard fable into a musical seems a logical development: after all, if animals are capable of talking and staging proletarian revolutions, there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to sing as well.
Derby Playhouse reprises Sir Peter Hall's adaptation, originally produced at the National Theatre in the mid-1980s. As you might expect for a show set in a farmyard, Stephen Edwards's production is full of fresh Eggs - members of the Playhouse's Egg Academy youth theatre, that is - who supplement a core of nine professional actors as a chorus of twittering chickens and docile sheep.
It's great to see community involvement on this scale. The trouble is, there's so much fur and feathers that the stage seems rather congested at times, and it's not until Napoleon launches his reign of terror that things begin to thin out a little. Nor does issuing the cast with crutches seem the ideal solution to the two legs/four legs dichotomy; there are moments when it seems less like a bustling farmyard than a slow march-past of shuffling invalids.
Still, you cannot question the commitment or the energy levels, and there's a genuinely chilling moment when the porcine politburo ditch their sticks and don business suits. Ben Roberts is terrifying as Napoleon, though his taciturn demeanour doesn't explain why he's allocated a jaunty music-hall number about being runt of the litter. And I wonder if it's intentional that Lucien MacDougall adopts the swallowed delivery of Tony Blair as Squealer, the revolution's principal spin-porker.
Adrian Mitchell's quirky lyrics are set by Richard Peaslee to music that sounds suitably utilitarian without being particularly memorable. But the insurmountable problem for any production of Animal Farm is that the narrative doesn't conclude so much as grind to a halt.
Orwell completed the book in the darkest days of Soviet repression, and Hall's adaptation predated perestroika by several years, which means there now seems so much more of the story to tell. One longs to find out how the animals cope with the final collapse of their collective ideal and capitulate to capitalism. Not all parables need sequels, but some need more sequels than others.
· Until June 24. Box office: 01332 363275.
