The Stage

Orwell: A Celebration

Published Friday 12 June 2009 at 12:05 by Natasha Tripney

It is 60 years since the publication of Orwell’s final and most culturally resonant, if not best, work - Nineteen Eighty-Four. To mark both that anniversary and that of Coming Up for Air, published in 1939, the Daily Telegraph’s theatre and comedy critic, Dominic Cavendish, has adapted four pieces of Orwell’s writing for the stage.

The first half is composed of an almost hour-long monologue taken from the underrated Coming Up for Air. The superb Hal Cruttenden, sweltering in a pin-striped suit, plays the frustrated George Bowling, a man who, feeling increasingly bitter and imprisoned in suburbia, goes on a journey back to the town in which he grew up. Played out on a naked stage, it is a captivating piece. Cruttenden’s Bowling is both an amiable bumbler and a man drowning in desperation.

The second half is composed of three shorter pieces: two of Orwell’s Burmese essays, Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging, read respectively by Ben Porter and Alan Cox, and an excerpt from Nineteen Eighty-Four. For this final piece these two performers come together to depict Winston Smith in the Ministry of Love. Simply staged by Gene David Kirk, this is nonetheless a tense and terrifying scene.

Orwell’s clear, acute prose retains its power when read and the production as a whole provides a reminder of the continued relevance of his works.