Photo: Tristram Kenton
How do you adapt George Orwell's famous memoir of the Spanish civil war for the stage?
The short answer, in this co-production between a quintet of English, Catalan and French theatres, is that you do not: what you do is offer a poetic evocation of the book, using speech, song, dance, film, and all the expressive techniques of modern theatre.
What you lose, inevitably, is Orwell's peculiar tone of voice: rueful, ironic, honest, self-deprecating.
As he describes the experience of joining one of the untrained, unskilled, yet touchingly democratic bands of militias despatched to the Spanish hills, the book's overriding impression is one of cold and futility.
And in Orwell's later account of being caught up in the Barcelona street-fighting between the Anarchists and Valencian assault guards, he recalls "a peculiar evil feeling in the air" as the opponents of Fascism lapse into internecine warfare.
Orwell's book is a stunning mixture of straight reportage and analysis. But Josep Galindo's bilingual production, with its mixture of British and Catalan actors, is a restless kaleidoscope that offers multiple narrative perspectives and that is stronger on atmosphere than language.
And one has to admit that its images are often vibrantly powerful. In the first half, authentic footage of the civil war is combined with arrays of objects such as buckets, boots, bottles, books, and empty uniforms that somehow convey the mixture of desolation and idealism which characterised the militia bands.
In the second half, you lose Orwell's political exposition of the conflicts between opposing acronyms and, in particular, the betrayal of the Trotskyites by the Stalinists.
But what does come across, partly through Neil Murray's design, is the fear and suspicion that underlay life in battered Barcelona.
Under the opulent chandelier of the Continental Hotel, well-heeled characters try to simulate bourgeois normality in a world of chaotic street battles and high-level skulduggery.
To be fair, the adapters, Pablo Ley and Allan Baker, capture Orwell's vivid vignettes of human decency in a disintegrating world. The opening glimpse of an Italian militia man to whom Orwell takes an instinctive liking is accurately preserved.
And there is a touching moment later on when Orwell, in seeking to rescue his friend Major Kopp from brutal incarceration, tries to penetrate Barcelona bureaucracy and finds a political opponent giving him an unexpected handshake.
The lesson of this highly impressionistic adaptation, in which peasant protest songs mix with images of oppression, is that it is at its best when it sticks closest to Orwell.
Kopp's remark that "this is not a war, it's a comic opera with an occasional death" production certainly leaves behind a number of vivid images: when Eileen Orwell's bedroom is raided and her interrogator kicks over the books that line the floor, the brutality of the times is sharply caught.
Whatever the show's rhetorical excesses, the sense that Orwell emerged with his faith in humanity miraculously unshaken still comes powerfully across.
· Until April 3. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
