ANIMAL FARM
Stratford East
★★★★
“some truly striking moments of grand theatricality”
First things first, there is no farm. Not one that we would recognise anyway. Not the solace of a green field or a puffy cloud against an azure sky. This Animal Farm is a factory farm. A gutter scythes through the stage running red with the blood of slaughtered animals.
In director Amy Leach’s powerful and visually stunning interpretation of the George Orwell novella, the world is a succession of wire cages. These animals’ lives are bloody, mucky and constrained.
Set and costume designer Hayley Grindle dresses the animals in smeared vests and boiler suits, their designation (Sheep, Dog etc) tattooed or worn as patches – and where have we seen that before?
Old Major (Everal A Walsh) warns his friends they are sleepwalking towards their own destruction. He too is carried off to the abattoir but his final cry for rebellion finds purchase and revolution follows.
In many of the beautifully worked set pieces – brutal, sinewy ballets – the look and feel is that of a Kraftwerk gig, all soulless electronica, wire and concrete picked out in red and white with starkly lit bodies as silhouettes in strobe-like slow motion.
It is against this backdrop of warehouse columns and ominous shadows that the menagerie fights for scraps of dignity, putting the agro into agro-industrial complex.
“Hambush!’ coos gossipy pigeon and part-time narrator Milo (Em Prendergast), who adds necessary comic relief to a relentlessly grim tale.
Snowball (Robin Morrissey) and Napoleon (Tachia Newall) square off in a battle of ideals. Sneaky little Squealer (Tom Simper) sows the seeds of distrust and watches his manipulations infect the mind of bombastic Napoleon who succumbs to paranoia and corruption.
Tatty Hennessy’s muscular adaptation – accessible through seamless British Sign Language – is never less than ambitious in its manifesto and purpose.
A banner reads “All animals are created equal.” Over the course of two hours the declaration becomes first an ideal, then a plan, then a provocation, then an anathema and finally a fig leaf to justify oppression. Some animals are more equal than others, Orwell reminds us.
Caught up in the crossfire is a vibrant selection of characters each given their own personalities mercifully free of nursery rhyme cliché. Clover (Tianah Hodding) is frustratingly naïve, Boxer (Gabriel Paul) hard working, Minty (Farshid Rokey) malleable, Clara (Brydie Service) maternal, Blue (Joshua-Alexander Williams) vicious and so on.
It is a truism that Orwell’s response to the Soviet Union is perennially relevant, even in its 80th anniversary year (which accounts for a high crop yield of productions recently). As a result, there is an occasional over-elaboration of message infecting a script which, otherwise, demonstrates effectively how division is a design flaw of the human soul.
There is another box, which sits above the stage, drenched in luxury. First the greedy farmers look down on the animals and then the animals look down on the lesser animals, watching them writhe in their own muck, this time out of deluded sense of community and joint endeavour.
Inevitably, characters become less distinctive as the end nears but the impressive cast holds out for as long as it can before surrendering to the needs of allegory.
Meanwhile, in this committed and sure-footed production, the slow descent into bleakness is marked out by some truly striking moments of grand theatricality.
ANIMAL FARM
Stratford East
Reviewed on 13th February 2025
by Giles Broadbent
Photography by Kirsten McTernan
Previously reviewed at this venue:
PINOCCHIO | ★★★★ | November 2024
WONDER BOY | ★★★★ | October 2024
ABIGAIL’S PARTY | ★★★★ | September 2024
NOW, I SEE | ★★★★ | May 2024
CHEEKY LITTLE BROWN | ★★★½ | April 2024
THE BIG LIFE | ★★★★★ | February 2024
BEAUTIFUL THING | ★★★★★ | September 2023
ANIMAL FARM
ANIMAL FARM
ANIMAL FARM
