Animal Farm
The Mac, Belfast
★★★☆☆
“There is an expectation that we’re forced to labour with every atom of our bodies,” someone says, in a rallying cry, early in Tinderbox Theatre Company’s latest production. That may sound like the passionate indignation of socialism, in our era of organised trade unions and collective bargaining. It may also be familiar as dialogue spoken by a porcine leader in Animal Farm, George Orwell’s novella from 1945.
Such is the efficiency of Orwell’s allegory, which maps a farm animals’ uprising in rural England into the birth of the Russian Revolution, and its unsettling warp into Stalin’s Great Purge, that what’s heard from the mouths of its critters can be credible when delivered by humans – in this case a quartet of mysterious protesters interned in a concrete cell, refusing to disclose their true identities. (“I already told you, I’m George Orwell.”)
The world of director Patrick J O’Reilly’s production is a Belfast plummeted into lockdown after peaceful protests that agitated into violent clashes. The recorded voices of a police state heard through a speaker describe Orwell’s novella as “antigovernment propaganda”, a censoring not far removed from reality. As recently as 2018, the Chinese Communist Party temporarily banned the phrase “Animal Farm” on social media when abolishing the term limit for President Xi Jinping.
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The women mount a defiant performance of Orwell’s beast fable from inside their prison cell, transforming into its porcine revolutionaries. “All animals are equal,” says Snowball (Catriona McFeely), a visionary with a plan to construct a windmill to improve the lives of weary working animals. Cut-throat rival Napoleon (Jo Donnelly), an opponent hungry for leadership (and raising a secret police of vicious canines) rouses fears about starvation, and persuades the farm to roll up its sleeves and work harder.
What follows is an anatomy of oppression, and of its key players and enablers. Squealer, a pig played by Susan Hoffman, gives news conferences with the friendly voice and smile of a press secretary but is really a chief propagandist, rewriting history and spreading conspiracy. Among a complacent citizenry, Clare McMahon’s impressive Boxer, a toiling workhorse, becomes a tragic example of blind faith.
That this ruffling, bleating farmland doesn’t become cloying is impressive. O’Reilly’s approach to movement is well considered, as if corporealised through the “animal studies” of the French physical-theatre pioneer Jacques Lecoq. What’s more difficult is delivering stirring moments of intimacy from within such exaggeration. As they stage Orwell’s battles, the inmates can’t help slipping out of their animal physicality and back into fighting stances from their own protests, but it doesn’t bring us any closer to them, as they’re abandoned instead to a battlefield of thick smoke and flashing sirens.
Most intriguing is what the play says about theatre, as the inmates urgently barricade themselves inside, performing to an audience of no one but themselves, knowing they are under surveillance. (I was reminded of plays performed by Cumann na mBan prisoners in Kilmainham Gaol during the Civil War.) What feels important is laying bare how we’ve been here before. They know art can still expose.
Animal Farm is at the Mac, Belfast, until Saturday, February 28th
