George Orwell wrote Animal Farm during the Second World War as a satire on the Soviet Union under Stalin. The Soviet Union was one of Britain’s wartime allies in the fight against fascism and as a result it wasn’t published until after the war ended. As the current geopolitical tectonic plates shift, this is a perfect time to revisit Orwell’s political allegory but, as the writer and director, Ellie Jones, says, in her version, the focus is less on the corruption of a Communist ideal and more on the capitalist system in which we all live.
British Youth Music Theatre is a young people’s drama organisation, equivalent to, and similar in scale to, the National Youth Theatre. Animal Farm was workshopped in the summer of 2023 and further developed over a two-week rehearsal period this Easter with a team of professional creatives and a cast of 34 young people aged between 11 and 21.
The action takes place in the farmyard of Manor Farm, soon renamed by the animals as Animal Farm. There is an on-stage band upstage right on a raised platform which also serves as the barn from which the pigs enter and exit. We are thrown straight into the action with a gunshot. The cast then enters and goes into the opening number with a chorus of, "Bite the hand that feeds us" as the farmer, Mr Jones, is expelled from the farm. Everyone in the cast is identified by a T-shirt which tells us their species and name. In some cases, they have an additional tail, ears or wings but the costumes, in keeping with the staging, are simple and effective.
The plot broadly follows the action of Orwell’s novel, so the animals take over running the farm, led by the pigs. Industrialisation arrives in the form of a windmill, the farm generates surplus value which the pigs use to trade with humans to their own benefit and the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.
Various topical references have been added along the way. A news programme disseminates fake news about Snowball’s disappearance, the crop fails because of the constant rain and at one point one of the animals says they need to "take back control". The prize boar, Old Major, sums up the shift in perspective, "there will come a time when your generation will have to fix the mistakes of ours." Young people are growing up in a world created by adults and they don’t like what they see.
The main innovation is the addition of a reverse timescale story, telling how Mr Jones came to buy Manor Farm in the first place. We see him going back through slaughtering his herd of pigs during the foot and mouth epidemic and losing his wife to illness. The show ends with his story having reached the day on which he bought the farm, full of hope for a new future, juxtaposed with the animals facing the reality of what it has now become.
The writer and director, Ellie Jones, keeps the action moving and there are confident performances from the young cast. Bradley Charles’s choreography suits them well with a range of styles from K-pop through chorus line kicks to the stationary marching step from Les Mis, "Do You Hear The People Sing?" on the song, "Beasts Of England". Rebecca Levy’s songs, with lyrics by Tom Ling, are enjoyable and include a rap battle between the pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, a pigeon chorus that owes a debt to "Sit Down You’re Rocking The Boat" from Guys And Dolls and several sentimental solo ballads.
The politics of privilege which Animal Farm examines are inevitably reflected in the show itself. As the arts continue to be squeezed out of state education at every level, organisations like BYMT offer young people an important, and increasingly rare, opportunity to participate in the arts.