How George Orwell would despair at today’s political discourse. His power-grabbing pigs in Animal Farm were an allegorical warning against Soviet-style dictatorship and propaganda. The more unequal the once egalitarian animal collective becomes, the more the ruling pig class rewrite their story.
Today, you do not need to look to totalitarian states to see politicians manipulate the narrative. Consider Donald Trump accusing his enemies of the flaws he himself is guilty of or, to pluck an example out of the air, our own prime minister claiming not to have made a bet we saw him shake hands on. For a generation of post-Johnson politicians, hoodwinking the public has become a reflex reaction.
So even if we no longer feel so keenly Animal Farm’s parallels with a mid-20th century Soviet Union, with the Stalin-like Napoleon banishing the Trotsky-like Snowball, we cannot avoid its resonances in a world of fake news and online conspiracy theories. As Orwell presents it, those who control the narrative are the victors.
This comes across lucidly in Iqbal Khan’s production for the Octagon, Hull Truck and Derby theatre, as the pigs doctor the graffitied slogans on the corrugated-iron pigsty set designed by Ciarán Bagnall. The noble principles of the revolution become compromised and the literature rewritten. Meanwhile, Ida Regan’s Napoleon goes from semi-articulate bystander to duplicitous despot. She is not an obvious candidate for promotion, too timid and uncertain, but is adept at letting her henchmen do her dirty work while she basks in the glory.
Less convincing are the surveillance-state cameras, first overseeing the barn and later forming the features of a human puppet. The implication is plain, but they would be more fitting for the psychological coercion of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, written a few years after Animal Farm, and add little to a story primarily about deception.
More irritating is the fidgety portrayal of the animals, the six-strong ensemble grunting and hoof-scraping through Ian Wooldridge’s 1982 adaptation like an undergraduate actors’ workshop. The production comes most alive when they trust us to remember who these animals are and let a still chilling story do its work.
At Octagon, Bolton, until 24 February then touring until 13 April
