National Post (National Edition)
Bet the farm it will be surreal
Orwell's out of copyright — and now the fun begins Jake Kerridge
George Orwell died from tuberculosis in January 1950, aged 46. Writers who can combine such originality of thought with such clarity of expression are rare enough that even now it's difficult not to be grief-struck by his lamentably premature demise.
But taking consolation where we can, we can celebrate the fact that in the month of the anniversary of his death comes the expiry of the copyright on his books.
What difference will that make? Orwell's executors have not been noticeably strict in comparison with some other literary estates, but there has been the odd kerfuffle. In 2015 the estate asked one company to stop selling beer mugs that bore extensive quotations from Orwell's works, leading inevitably to accusations of Big Brotheresque censorship. From now on, however, you could market a range of tea towels containing the entire text of Animal Farm and nobody would be able to stop you.
The major consequence, however, is likely to be a rash of Orwellian films, television adaptations and so on, with filmmakers now untrammelled by the need to win the estate's approval — to say nothing of having to pay a copyright fee.
First off the blocks is Orwell's Animal Farm, a new video game. Its developer, Imre Jele, has talked about how much he identified with Orwell's fable while growing up in Communist Hungary. It's a management simulation game: those players who make the right decisions about how to run Manor Farm — for instance, by outwitting the autocratic pigs and organizing it along Socialist principles — will see it thrive.
No doubt cynics are already harrumphing that before we know it A Muppet Animal Farm will have been green lit, with Miss Piggy as the Stalinesque Napoleon. But I certainly hope that any forthcoming dramatizations will be bold enough to do something unconventional with Orwell's books, and throw a new light on them.
The haunting and beautiful 1954 cartoon film of Animal Farm, made by the British company Halas and Batchelor and with all the characters voiced by the preternaturally versatile Maurice Denham, is a classic; but it is unlikely that Orwell would have approved of the tacked-on happy ending, in which the farm animals call on outside help to defeat Napoleon and his pigs.
The film was revealed decades later to have been funded by the CIA, and Orwell would have loathed his story being used as an allegorical endorsement of the United States' self-image as the world's policeman.
Incidentally, Everette Howard Hunt, the late CIA agent and author, claimed to have secured the film rights from Orwell's widow, Sonia, by promising to arrange for her to meet her favourite film star, Clark Gable.
It was Sonia Orwell who put the kibosh on one of the most fascinating prospective adaptations of her husband's work in the '70s — David Bowie's abortive televised musical of Nineteen EightyFour. “Mrs. Orwell refused to let us have the rights, point blank,” Bowie later recalled. “For a person who married a socialist with communist leanings, she was the biggest upper-class snob I've ever met in my life. `Good heavens, put it to music?' It really was like that.”
Some of the songs from this abandoned project — such as Big Brother and We Are the Dead — found their way onto Bowie's apocalyptic album Diamond Dogs, and there's the marvellous possibility that somebody might now construct a new adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four incorporating these tracks.
This would surely be preferable to yet another straight dramatization of the novel. When Nigel Kneale's adaptation, with Peter Cushing as Winston Smith, was broadcast by the BBC in 1954, questions were asked in Parliament about its “sadism” and one 42-year-old woman from Herne Bay allegedly dropped dead of shock.
This is also an ideal opportunity for television and film companies to take a risk and dramatize some of Orwell's lesser-known books.
Burmese Days, his first novel, drew on his experiences as an officer in the Imperial Indian Police force in Burma in the 1920s; he later described it as “full of purple passages in which my words were used partly for the sake of their sound,” so a strippeddown version of the story shorn of the uncharacteristically flowery prose might be very welcome.
The anti-colonialist sentiments expressed in that book caused Orwell's former principal at the Mandalay Police Training School to threaten to horsewhip him if he ever saw him again.
In addition to his novels, Orwell's autobiographical books would also make for compelling dramas — he packed more into his life than most people who live twice as long. As well as his time in Burma he spent a time undercover as a tramp reporting on the French and British underclasses (as detailed in Down and Out in Paris and London) and his experiences — which included being shot in the throat — fighting Fascism in the Spanish Civil War (Homage to Catalonia).