Orwell's out of copyright — and now the fun begins
Expect a rush of video games, films and more
George Orwell died from tuberculosis in January 1950 at age 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 — something that won't happen for decades with the work of such longer- lived contemporaries as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. It is to be hoped that interest in Orwell will receive a boost — and as we live in a world that sometimes seems to be heading increasingly close to the nightmarish vision of Nineteen Eighty-four, it couldn't be timelier.
What difference will it 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 Brother-esque 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 where we are A Muppet Animal Farm will have been green lit, with Miss Piggy as the Stalin-esque 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. What we don't want are more adaptations like Robert Bierman's 1997 film of the 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which stuck closely to the literal content of the book while failing to capture its sardonic spirit.
Fidelity to the source material has hardly been guaranteed over the past 70 years, in any case. 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.
It was Sonia Orwell who put the kibosh on one of the most fascinating prospective adaptations of her husband's work in the Seventies — David Bowie's abortive televised musical of Nineteen Eighty- Four. “Mrs. Orwell refused to let us have the rights, point blank,” Bowie later recalled.
Some of the songs from this abandoned project — such as Big Brother and We Are the Dead — found their way on to 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 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.
In addition to his novels, Orwell's autobiographical books would also make for compelling dramas — he packed a lot into his short life. As well as his time in Burma there is the period he spent 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).
More Orwell on our telescreens would certainly be a useful corrective in our current climate. Let us just hope nobody will be watching us watching him from the other side of the screen.