Animal Farm – modern day protesters give their take on Orwell’s classic tale (Tinderbox Theatre at The MAC until 28 February)

Four stellar performances anchor Tinderbox’s adaptation of Animal Farm. A group of women have been placed in a distressed holding cell that looks like it had long been abandoned until a large number of people were arrested at a protest and suddenly needed to be held, just part of a wider state crackdown. In an act of solidarity, they each declare “I am George Orwell” and from that point the four refuse to say anything other than recite sections of the famous book.

They work their way through the main beats of the story: the overthrow of the humans, the seven commandments of animalism, the plans for a windmill (brought to life with a precarious stack of chairs), moving back into the farmhouse, making deals with the humans, and turning on each other.

You need to suspend disbelief – though this is a Tinderbox production so that very much comes with the territory – that anyone, even fervent anti-totalitarian protesters, could quote huge chunks from Orwell’s allegory which celebrated its 80th publication birthday last summer. (Wearing a different hat, I produced an episode of BBC Radio Ulster’s Sunday Sequence devoted to the anniversary, and the interview with the director of the Orwell Foundation Jean Seaton, and the Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov (whom Seaton says is a modern day Orwell) can still be heard if you’re on the UK side of the BBC’s geoblock wall.)

The protesters’ Animal Farm excerpts are interrupted by tannoy announcements from an unseen guard who warns that their behaviour is crime and will not be tolerated. In my head, the voice through the speaker on the wall was going to end up narrating a smaller contemporary story that would be neatly woven around the familiar Animal Farm tale. However, Tinderbox had their own ideas and the guard’s admonitions merely grow steadily more severe and increase the fervour of the women’s literary protest.

Tracey Lindsay’s set consists of a cell with metal-legged tables and chairs. The grimy concrete back wall (with its convenient white board) is raised up from the MAC’s floor. The gap beneath enables a rather effective special effect as the women’s behaviour finally tips the authorities to react with more than words.

The whole production could perhaps also be viewed through the lens of a fever dream, inspired by the increasingly totalitarian behaviour of some actual governments – and particularly some political leaders – as a vision of how people could fight back by holding a mirror of Orwell’s analysis up to state perpetrators who seem to be skidding towards repeating some very regrettable history.

No matter how you choose to analyse how Tinderbox have set the story, Orwell’s concepts are made to feel very contemporary. History is being rewritten. Former allies are being turned into enemies of the state. Power is being seen to corrupt. Fighting back is being crushed with violence and oppression. Old enemies are becoming strange bedfellows.

So much of the movement on stage and the use of props has clearly been devised during the rehearsal process. The simple chairs become attack dogs. Rosie McClelland’s costumes combined with the actors’ twisted bodies, stance and gait transform them into pigs, horses, a cat, and rather brilliantly, chickens.

Like Boxer, one of the book’s many characters that she plays, Clare McMahon is a workhorse who carries some of the crucial parts of the story, starting with Old Major’s idealistic speech that has to be so well anchored for the subsequent creeping rewriting of history to be effective. Clare also has the ignominy of playing the greatest number of characters that come to a grisly end.

Catriona McFeely is amazing throughout, with her animated hen one of the strongest and funniest moments of the play as she flicks through a range of emotions. Her physicality rarely pauses, bounces up on top of tables, transforming into a flirty cat, playing the pig Snowball as well as the farmer Mr Jones.

Susan Hoffman’s whiteboard marker-sniffing Squealer delivers believable missives to the other animals that misdirect them from the truth.

Jo Donnelly is no stranger to playing political tyrants, and her stare-eyed take on Napolean is fearsome, doubling down on those questioning the logic of what is happening, rewriting history with an iron fist, and letting others do his dirty work until he eventually gets blood on his hands.

In recent years, Tinderbox have excelled at putting a contemporary spin on classic tales. Shifting Rhino into the world of gaming and screens was genius. Switching Yerma from Spain to rural Ireland rooted the playwrights message in the local.

This adaptation of Animal Farm is a fine retelling of much of the tale and the production’s lens of protest certainly accentuates the contemporary resonances. Napoleon announcing that the windmill will be known as Napoleon’s Windmill has an eerie echo of arts centres and airports being named after presidents. The fact that it’s humans rather than cartoon animations playing the animals and speaking the pigs’ perfidious dialogue adds power to the message. But the fine animal characterisations and the energy on stage still seem to be lacking something that would more substantially glue the reciting protesters to their fulsome knowledge of Orwell’s text and the manner of their protest.

Animal Farm continues at The MAC until 28 February.

Photo credit: Carrie Davenport

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