George Orwell's 'Animal Farm': Not 'Just for Laughs'

George Orwell’s two seminal works of fiction, Animal Farm and 1984, were written in a tumultuous time. Animal Farm, published in 1945, was written as a Stalinist era dystopian allegory which made Orwell famous in the post-war world. 1984, published in 1949, another dystopian work of fiction, documented totalitarianism and its methods of controlling people—perpetual war, government surveillance and mind control.

Today, these two works of Orwell are more relevant than they ever were. If you take the Chomskyian view, not much has changed—only the Stalinist regime has changed to late capitalism, where the rule of the pigs has transmogrified into the rule of the corporate oligarchs—the war on terror is perpetual, technology is enabling the government to track their citizens with ever greater ease and corporate media plays as the mind controlling arm of the rulers. Democratic socialism (that Orwell subscribed to) is dead.

At such a time, when W!ld Rice chose to stage Animal Farm (adapted by Ian Wooldridge) to kick off its 10th anniversary celebrations, the expectations ran high. Would it echo the siege of our times? Would it mirror the globalised utopia that we live in today—trapped in our consumerism and relative powerlessness?

The good news is that the production lives up to the expectations. The adaptation has been well localized and it leaves the audience in no doubt that the play speaks to them about their own everyday reality (work hard, pay the rent-seekers, and work harder—a slippery slope of never making enough, never having enough). To establish this connection, there are hints galore and you don’t have to be too discerning to spot them.

The writer (Orwell and Wooldridge) and director (Ivan Heng) make us take ample note of the fact that tyranny is the fate of human beings. No matter how many times they overthrow a tyrant, there will always be a new tyrant who will rise from their ranks. Revolutions spring in our breasts the hope for a new future and every time, after the war has been won, blood has been shed, sacrifices have been made, this optimism is crushed by a new tyrant, rising like a phoenix in a new avatar, necessitating another revolution. There is no escape from this human fate—the cycle of revolution and tyranny.

There is also a comment on the role of organized religion (which is ironically so Marxist): Moses the Raven keeps referring to the Sugarcandy Mountain. I wish this oblique reference to a life of perpetual happiness in the heaven could have been made more direct and contemporary. Like in the scene where Squealer distributes the apples among the sheep (audience) and calls them organic produce. That is contemporization and it is wholesome.

The plot, as it were, is faithful to the book and the characters are selfsame—Old Major, Napoleon, Snowball, Squealer and so on. The actors have played their part so convincingly that you forget they are playing animals and that they are talking about things that are familiar to your bone. Pam Oei as Squealer gets the most laughs but then at times the play falls in the danger of skidding into the realm of comedy (as in a skit—in satire, we must remember, the desire for social change remains underlined). Lim Yu-Beng as the sinister Napoleon is impressive. Gani Abdul Karim as Boxer is believable but it is Benjamin (sorry, missed the actor’s name but the guy who plays the donkey) who takes the cake for me.

The static set of the Manor Farm is a bit simple, even boring. However, the music by the man in white Jenson Koh nicely complements it. In a particular scene, I like it when he walks on to the stage and creates a storm with his drum sticks. Bravo! I also like the ‘Who let the dogs out’ part—it gives the play a cool contemporary feel, sutures it to our present times (why did I think of Abu Gharaib when that song played on?).

As David Hare has said recently, in Stalinist Russia, the most powerful protest you could make was to stage Hamlet. In our globalised land, it could well be George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Full marks to the cast and crew of Animal Farm for this powerful and timely production. It’s a must see for anyone who has a taste for reality.

When: 21 APRIL – 08 MAY 2010

Where: DRAMA CENTRE THEATRE, SINGAPORE

Naseeruddin Shah on Theatre and Dastangoi

Naseeruddin Shah on the theatre group
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These days I have been reading some of the plays written by Singapore playwright and director Elangovan. He often goes for very provocative themes (The Gandhis of India being the subject of his latest production) which sometimes lands his plays in unsavoury situations. Most of his plays have politics for theme which is always interesting but a risky exercise. I assume that he enjoys that element of risk and provocation in his creative work--he is an adventure sportsman of theatre, if I may say so. And when I say this, I'm not being mean or disparaging.

His plays, I found, are rich in information but that makes them very verbose (he would have made a great investigative journalist). I don't know how his actors manage to deliver their lines as dialogues in his plays sometimes run to several paragraphs or even more than a page! A tough act! Nevertheless, his plays are important because they record things that nobody else will say or write.

But this post is not about him or his plays. Maybe I will write about that in future. What I want to relate here is that in Singapore, I got the opportunity to watch some theatre, follow some action in this line and I intend to keep doing that.

I had very little exposure to good theatre in school or even in college. At Aligarh, some of my friends were doing theatre but I hardly went to see any. I wanted to join theatre in college but unfortunately I did not read the list of selected candidates for the drama group@JNU and lost my chance. Never tried again. I was too lazy or too worried about my career. So, Mumbai, you are one 'struggler' less. More on that some other time again.

This post is about a man, an actor, who I have always admired. One of India's greatest actors, Naseeruddin Shah reminisces his past and present engagement with theatre as an art form, in a personal piece in Tehelka. Here, he reveals his love and respect for Geoffrey Kendall and his group Shakespeareana. In this piece, he also talks about Jerzy Grotowski, a great theatre actor, director and teacher whose style of theatre expounded in his book Towards a Poor Theatre greatly influenced Naseer:

Grotowski had extreme contempt for Broadway. Theatre can never match cinema’s illusion, so why was it competing to be the same? He asked three big questions: Is what theatre could do being done better than cinema? The answer was no. Then what was it that theatre used to do before the advent of cinema? And third, where had theatre sprung from? Theatre, he said, began with man’s need to communicate, not to dazzle. And in order to communicate, you don’t need huge castles disappearing on stage and helicopters and gondolas. The essential magic of theatre was to stimulate the imagination. Our poverty of resources should be our strength, not our weakness, he argued. If you remove everything extraneous – sets, lights, props, costumes – all you need is one actor in a black suit willing to work his butt off, and you have theatre. When you have two people who meet and talk, you have theatre. In his later life, Grotowski extended this argument so far, he began to dispense even with dialogue. He went on a different trip, searching for the primal state and sound. Theatre became synonymous with life – to a point where you couldn’t get a straight answer from him to any question, like what time of day it was.

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Now, Naseer wants to stick to Dastangoi. I am eager to see him do it--I hope his group performs in Singapore in future. View this dastangoi clip (the only one I could find on Youtube) and tell me what you think of it. Do you also think that something like this could have inspired the great Dev Anand to speak the way he does (he delivers his dialgoues in a trademark Dev Anand style) or vice versa? I don't mean any disrespect to anyone but that's what came to my mind when I saw it.