animal farm

photo: www.broadwayworld.com

Perhaps we should be worried that theatre makers are still drawn to the story of Animal Farm in 2025. Why are audiences still enraptured by this warning against tyranny, and will it become more relevant in an age where we are quite quickly falling back into the fascism that for decades we were warned against?

Of course, the main audience for any production of Animal Farm will be school children, and I became aware at the end of the production that I was being too cynical in assuming that everyone would understand the message of the story easily or quickly, or that they would have experience enough of life to recognise the situations that play out before our eyes every day. I do feel that setting this story in England results in the story becoming a kind of glib, satirical stab at the political class in this country, rather than an actual call to arms against tyranny and fascism, much like The Thick of It highlights the issues we have been facing in Britain for most of modern politics, but is hardly a piece of art that inspires us to act. The upper-middle-class sounding titters at various moments in the dialogue seemed to confirm this for me.

I read somewhere that George Orwell, in writing Animal Farm, wanted to 'fuse political purpose and artistic purpose', and I think this production achieves this. Amy Leach's artistic choices for Tatty Hennessy's adaptation of a highly important story made the emotional impact of the story that much greater. The lighting, sound and choreography created excellent atmosphere, the separation of the farm house and where the animals existed, and the slow movement of the pigs into the farm house served as a clear sign of the changing hierarchies. The subtle inclusion of Snowball, played by Robin Morrissey wearing glasses, and subsequently, Napoleon, played by Tachia Newall, finding them in the corner of the stage and choosing to wear them, developing into Napoleon and Squealer wearing jackets felt extremely sinister. By far the most sinister moment in the whole production however, was the painful, visceral growth of Napoleon's trotters into a human hand in order to make a deal with the humans that would ensure the conjugation of the other animals once more. Tianah Hodding's portrayal of Clover was instantly endearing, with an optimistic and positive view of the future that was inspiring and their descent into despair was heartbreaking and to me served as a symbol of what we are trying to protect. I went with them on their journey in wanting a happy ending for the group. Their defeaning scream as the final moment of the production took my breath away and made sure that the horror of what was to come truly hit home for me.

Overall, I think that the children getting this production as part of their Animal Farm studies are incredibly lucky. I felt that the issues that the book addresses were simply put, but with enough nuance to still make you think, and particularly to a level that would make for excellent talking points in class and in esssays, not to mention the diversity of this cast being excellent inspiration for a group of young people. We might make more young people more radical if productions like this were available to us at such a young age.