Orwell adaptation loses its gravity
Animal Farm
Written by Anthony MacMahon. Directed by Ravi Jain. Until April 7 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 50 Tank House Lane. Soulpepper.ca or 416-866-8666.
In Donald Trump’s America, politics is about standing up for the working class. In Animal
Farm, or at least in Anthony MacMahon’s Soulpepper Theatre-commissioned adaptation, it’s about the workhorse.
Soulpepper’s technically flashy stage production turns George Orwell’s 1945 novella that satirizes Russian Stalinism into a cautionary tale against late stage capitalism, fake news and propaganda, and “bootstraps” ideology by turning the fat pig Napoleon into a stand-in for the current American president (a stretch, you can imagine).
Act1of this version of the middle-school staple begins as expected — the patriarchal pig Old Major (Jennifer Villaverde) has a dream, and just before he dies, he urges the other animals on Jones’s farm to rise against their totalitarian leader who rations their food and forces them to work for his gain. The next time Jones forgets to feed the animals, they form an uprising against the humans — at the end, there’s a martyr in the cow Bessie (Leah Cherniak); followers in donkey Benjamin (Guillermo Verdecchia), horse Boxer (Oliver Dennis) and chicken Mercy (Raquel Duffy); and a new government run by the pigs Napoleon (Rick Roberts), Snowball (a comically cerebral Sarah Wilson) and Squealer (Miriam Fernandes).
Soon, Snowball’s desire for process and checks and balances (impenetrable for uneducated and illiterate constituents) is overridden by Napoleon’s pomp and ceremony; Snowball is banished; and Napoleon assumes power. It’s not hard to see where Soulpepper’s instincts for a modern adaptation began.
Director Ravi Jain plays to his background in physical theatre and clowning to turn Orwell’s drama into a comedy, in particular giving the battle scene a few major gags — chickens shoot out eggs like machine guns, and red yarn is a playful stand-in for blood and gore.
But while the first act’s strife gives weight to the comedy, in the second act it veers into unwieldy territory. Act 2 begins with a shoe commercial, which Boxer and Benjamin watch before hearing the lottery results (the slow-talking Dennis and philosophizing Verdecchia are a touching buddy comedy duo — while standing under a branch of an apple tree in act one, they appear the delightful side of Waiting for Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon). Meanwhile, Squealer has become a slick news anchor, Napoleon has built an egg-based economy that overworks the chickens while he both trades with and is at war with neighbouring farms (the Assads and the Genghises), and the chickens, led by Mercy, stage a “Bawk-upy” protest (featuring a highlight performance from Jennifer Villaverde as a blood-lusty chicken).
In his adaptation, MacMahon tries to include as many contemporary parallels as possible, but only stays surface level on their implications. When Boxer is injured not in a battle with the humans, but by working himself into the ground, his fate is sealed with no access to health care, there’s also no room for interpretation when the realities of the farm life and the real world are so literal. It seems that in its desire for clear-cut comedy (animals with Medicare, who would have thought?), Act 2 of Animal Farm loses the gravity of Act 1.
It has nowhere to go and ends with a hurried and unearned final rebellious yell.
This may not have been so frustrating if Jain’s use of slapstick comedy had hit all the way through (which it has in the past, such as in his version of The 39 Steps for Soulpepper in 2016). But on opening night, uneven pacing kept some bits from landing with the audience (like an especially committed performance from Paolo Santalucia as a dancing TV director pig).
Instead of the story, Jain’s innovative use of costume and makeup (by Ken Mackenzie) and voice distortion (sound design by Richard Feren) will be the element Animal Farm is remembered for. The costume and sound successfully blends the human performer with the animal character, in particular when the human voice and animal alteration are audible at the same time.
Instead of having the animals slide full force into anthropomorphic caricatures, these elements keep the mystery behind where one ends and another begins.