'After all, what IS a road like Ellesmere Road? Just a prison with the cells all in a row. A line of semi-detached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and his wife riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches.'
This is the first of many observations from Coming Up For Air that has the audience shouting their approval in the packed confines of the Trafalgar Studio's second, basement stage. There are so many highlights in this evening's performance of Orwell - a Celebration, and if there's one minor criticism it's that the best of them are in the first half.
Orwell is renowned around the world as a prescient, razor-sharp analyst of oppression and nonsense, visited upon the individuals by the overlords of society, be they property developers, colonialists, Nazis or futuristic dictators dedicated to a life of rage and hatred. What he also provides in each of the four pieces offered here is a rallying voice shouting against the madness. His clear-sighted dissection of our foibles and dreads allows him to offer shreds of hope, and at the very least a rational damnation of the rubbish we've come to accept. His writing is timeless and modern, concerned as it is with the traps of human nature.
My programme notes inform me that Dominick Cavendish, who has done a remarkable job adapting the four pieces presented here, 'felt it would be a strange oversight not to attempt a tribute to that legacy' when he noticed a double publishing anniversary for Nineteen Eighty-Four (June 1949) and Coming Up For Air (June 1939). Well, maybe. But any excuse is a good one! I'd heartily recommend anyone with an ounce of social conscience, cynicism, humour or an interest in the human spirit to spend a couple of hours at this show savouring some of the best-observed barbs ever penned.
What we get is two hours split into four playlets. Broadly speaking, we have Orwell on the subjects of middle class misery, colonial hypocrisy, capital punishment and the eternal fight between hatred and hope.
The pre-interval first half is already in place, as it were, and features comedian Hal Cruttenden giving an astonishing monologue with which he has already toured the country in the character of George 'Fatty' Bowling, the oppressed salesman protagonist of Coming Up For Air. In the second half Ben Porter and Alan Cox deliver excerpts from Shooting An Elephant and A Hanging respectively before teaming up for a bombastic, nerve-shredding interrogation from the climax of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The first half is better than the second. Not that the second half is a disaster, just that Cruttenden is polished and engaging and presents an entire story. It's a heart-rending, hilarious tale of a man dreaming of recapturing his youth and discovering that it's been obliterated, before returning to a crushing suburban existence. When he locks eyes with me on the line 'my active life, if I ever had one, ended when I was sixteen' I'm riveted, then heartily sorry for the poor guy.
Ben Porter gives a good account of himself as a ridiculous colonial policeman driven by show-off tendencies to kill an expensive and beautiful creature, but Alan Cox as an observer of an execution is better. It's simply a very good story, chilling in its depiction of reticent executioners ending a life. The Ministry of Love scene from Orwell's most famous book is brilliant and visceral, and offers a most explicit renunciation of fear, paranoia and misery from the doomed Winston. One realises as the prisoner shouts his defiance that this is a common theme throughout the work: despair, of course, at man's grasping, manipulative and selfish nature, but a belief in something decent, and stronger among individuals. In a way the colonial tales are the bleakest because of the mighty power directing pawns to take life against their will. But then, colonialism provides the clearest evidence that such miserable systems must decay, no matter what evil replaces them.
It seems churlish to insist and repeat that the first part is the best. Better perhaps to say that it is more likely to make you laugh, and snare your sympathy and sensibilities through a comical fat man. This prepares you to really think about the misery in the second act.
Not that this is a downcast evening. It's hard to sleep with such a welter of brilliant, caustic observations churning through the memory, but an anger as clear and unstinting as Orwell's is an inspiration. The show runs until the fourth of July and I urge you to go and see it.
Photo credit: Dawn Cruttenden
Book tickets for Orwell at the Trafalgar Studios until the 4th of July
Check out London Fringe Theatre and Comedy
Check out London Comedy Theeatre
Check out Things To Do in London
Add an event
Sex with a Stranger at Trafalgar Studios
The bold title of Stefan Golaszewski’s new play, while undoubtedly attention grabbing, is slightly...