Can Animal Farm The Musical Ever Work?
Published on Tuesday 27th July, 3.21pm, Written by Jonathan Dudley
As we know, at the moment the whole world is in love with musical adaptations.
Be it film or novel, the theatre-going public just can’t get enough of seeing familiar stories on stage with a few showtunes thrown in for good measure.
An artist's impression of what the Animal Farm The Musical workshops might look like.
Last time, I looked at a few movies that, in my/Twitter’s humble opinion, would make good West End musicals. This week I was planning on doing something similar with books, until I read the puzzling news that Elton John and Lee Hall are working on a musical adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Isn’t that curious? The best bits of the creative team behind Billy Elliot teaming up again to bring Orwell’s nightmarish Stalinist dystopia to the West End stage. Seems a bit of an odd choice.
Just in case you missed out on Animal Farm at school/college/university here’s the gist: Grumpy old pig calls all the animals of Manor Farm to a meeting, moans about humans and teaches the animals a rousing revolutionary song, he dies. Two young pigs assume command, turn the grumpy old (and now dead) pig’s rantings into a philosophy, they then spark a revolt and the animals expel the drunken farmer from Manor Farm, renaming it Animal Farm.
The pigs teach the other animals to read and write, there’s plenty of food and everyone has a jolly old time. Then the pigs get a bit carried away, create positions of power for themselves, and train up some puppies as a sort of super-cute Cheka (no, really). Eventually the farmer decides he wants his farm back, which seems fair as the pigs haven’t really factored property law into their revolution, and a battle at the cowshed ensues. The farmer is defeated (despite his opposable thumbs and likely access to firearms).
The new society doesn’t really work out, the ‘Seven Commandments of Animalism’ are fiddled with to suit the pigs’ needs and the only well-intentioned pig on the farm is expelled. In the end the other pigs start wearing clothes and hanging out with farmers. At this point pretty much all readers decide that a) pigs are not to be trusted and b) Stalinism/communism isn’t a great idea and capitalism is pretty nice, actually.
As a story, it’s pretty interesting. But can it really translate to the West End stage? The question that particularly bothers me is that of costuming. It seems to me that we only have four options.
- 1) The Lion King style costumes.
- 2) Sophisticated animatronics or puppets a la War Horse.
- 3) Minimalist costumes, just masks or clothing that suggest which animal an actor is supposed to represent.
- 4) Body paints and stick-on tails.
Obviously number four is straight out of the window; having actors painted up like pigs with curly tails stuck on seems a little bit indecent. And silly. Number three seems, to me, to detract from the point of Animal Farm. The story just becomes another dystopian warning without Boxer being an actual horse, or at least a man in a decent horse costume. We know the whole story is allegorical, but it’s nice to have a bit of spectacle on stage.
This leaves us with big costumes or puppets, both are pretty sensible ideas and with Avenue Q closing there’s certainly a gap in the market for a good grown up puppet show. However, as much as I’d like to see a giant puppet pig called Napoleon on the West End stage, I suspect that it’s unlikely. As are Lion King style costumes.
As much as it pains me, I suspect that the minimalist option will be taken, lest a musical featuring singing pigs be considered silly.
No doubt Sir Elton et al know exactly what they’re doing, but right now I really can’t see how this will work. It’ll get audiences, pretty much everyone read Animal Farm at some point during their education and school groups will no doubt descend on this production with notepads a-rustling, but could it ever be a true West End success story?
Will the unsettling surrealism of the novel ever translate to the stage? It’ll be a struggle for a man in a pig costume to be halfway as scary as Napoleon is, or for the gang of earnest young actors who’ll inevitably be cast as the puppy Cheka to actually be menacing in their furry little outfits.
I can’t help but think that this show will be entertaining but will lose all the impact of the novel. However, it’s Sir Elton and he knows music far FAR better than I, so we’ll have to wait and see.
Oh god, love the picture.
However:
“As we know, at the moment the whole world is in love with musical adaptations.”
Yeah, but I gotta say, the Brits seem slightly more in love with them than the rest. :P
As excellent as all the points in this are – the picture is flipping hilarious!