Orwell’s Animal Farm for the twenty-first century

The start of George Orwell’s Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945) finds an assembly of animals gathered to hear the strange dream that Old Major had the night before. The 12-year-old boar prefaces his narrative with a polemic against the miserable and toilsome lives that they are living in Manor Farm: ‘No animal in England knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in England is free. The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth’ (5). Orwell traces the resultant revolution, revealing some of its flaws while resisting a monocausal reading for its failure. In what follows, I discuss this play with its most recent adaptor, Toronto-based theatre artist Anthony MacMahon. We examine the novella’s resonance in the twenty-first century, and analyse the adaptation’s treatment of, and response to, Orwell.