It’s easy to forget that George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a chillingly forensic examination of the architectures of authoritarianism, maybe because the animals are cute. It wasn’t 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.
But allegory is Orwell’s 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’t, we’re doomed to repeat it.
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’s story, as if things couldn’t turn out any other way. Maybe it’s the speed and telescoping; events happen so quickly, systems enforced and discarded in the blink of an eye, we don’t get time to contemplate or weigh consequences. It’s that rare thing in the theatre: a one-hour show that could easily, and probably should, have been longer.
It opens with a man squeezing a rubber chicken, followed by a faux-Werner Herzog monologue about the enormity of a chicken’s 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).
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’s opening monologue). The cast are uniformly excellent clowns all performing at speed, and it’s a joy to watch.
Less assured is the plotting. So many of Orwell’s 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’s often riotously fun, but key narrative beats – the seven commandments, the writing of them down and the breaking of them one by one, for example – are either lost or obscured along the way. The result is less disquieting and resonant than it might have been.
Refracting classic works through a contemporary Australian lens is Bloomshed’s defining feature, as they showed recently in their production of Pride and Prejudice, which cleverly depicted Regency England through the lens of Australia’s housing crisis. Animal Farm is a less obvious vehicle for transposition – its themes too monstrous and its historical significance too overwhelming, perhaps – so the local references feel shoehorned and slightly petty. The production works best when it cleaves to Orwell’s original design, as in a scene of political purging involving confetti cannons that is as awful as it is hilarious.
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’s also precision and control in the comic performances – the anthropomorphising, the shifts from silliness to savagery – that ranks with the best clowning in the country. Nathan Burmeister and Samantha Hastings’ 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.
What of Orwell’s 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’s 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’re already living under despots, enslaved and miserable while billionaires turn into trillionaires and the resources run dry. Sounds Orwellian to me.
• Animal Farm is on at Arts Centre Melbourne until 22 August then Canberra Theatre Centre 3-5 September
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