★★★
Boys and their toys, pigs and their propaganda.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a cautionary tale synced into our psyche – and with each passing year you could still declare it ‘as relevant as ever’.
In Iqbal Khan’s new Octagon Theatre Bolton production, and adapted by Ian Wooldridge, the farm is as far from idyllic as you can get.
Ciarán Bagnall has designed a set stripped of greenery and growth, replacing it with skeletal heads hanging from the rafters and flickering surveillance cameras.
It’s torn apart by the animals – multi-roled by a six-piece ensemble. With bared teeth and growls, the revolution against the two-legged Mr Jones begins with wooden planks lifted from the floor, repurposed as shields, weapons and finally, windmills.
They move animalistically, with tucked hands into hooves, rattling against the spinning steel-planked backdrops of their cages, and trailing the studio space. Never pushing quite hard enough to break through. Realised with empathetic headpieces (designed by Su Newell) that balance on their heads like their morals, and speaking in stereotypical accents, we meet the swaggering swine Napoleon (Rhian Lynch), workhorse Boxer (Sam Black) and the pessimistic old donkey Benjamin (Soroosh Lavasani) as they try to read and understand the seven commandments painted onto stable doors they glow in the half-light – a quirk that extends to the show programme.
In parts, they resemble a circus troupe. Dressed in patchwork boiler suits, under Shelley Ava Haden’s movement direction, they crawl and contort like clowns – smearing their eye makeup and camouflage body art. It’s jarring at times, at arms with Dylan Townley’s sound design, which threatens to go full-out punk, before bursting into folk song and even gospel celebration but never commits.
Act two also sees a chance for comedy. Dark comedy, of course. But it’s welcome. It's memorable, and delivered in large by raven Moses (Olivia Chandler – who sings of the rewards of Sugarcandy Mountain), Squealer the posse pig (Lewis Giffin – who did a great job at acting as a winning gameshow contestant at the climax), and the dithering, exploited Clover (Natalia Campbell).
Ultimately, however, there’s no momentum. Breaking the fourth wall to declare: “And he was never seen again,” is lazy storytelling that gives no credit to the storytellers on stage. The slow pacing only exists to force an interval between two short acts. Khan would have been better to chop off the fat and run full throttle straight-through.
コメント