Animal Farm by George Orwell

a rehearsed play-reading
May 2000

This is the second rehearsed reading that the Lisbon Players has presented. The first one was Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, directed in 1993 by George Ritchie. With the adaptation of Animal Farm, Ritchie will not only revive the classic story, but more over, through the use of a highly qualified cast, a bare set and minimal lighting, will bring us a tense and dramatic reading of the play.

George Orwell's biting satire Animal Farm is a fable with a sting. Millions of words have been written about the threat of Totalitarianism, but it was George Orwell, the farsighted British author of the brilliant and frightening 1984, who succeeded in exposing the Russian experiment for what it really was: an idealist's dream, converted by realists into a nightmare. In the adaptation brought to us by the Lisbon Players you will meet beasts whose prototypes have dominated news headlines for over 50 fearful years.

Opening on a note of joyous triumph for the creatures who have emancipated themselves from the cruel mastery of a human owner, the reading mounts inexorably to a climax of disillusionment, in which the other animals discover themselves now subject to the rule of even more ruthless autocrats: the greedy, cunning pigs.

Intermingling humour and drama, Animal Farm wrings the emotions of its listeners, leaving audiences shaken with the tale of a tragedy that happened in a mythical barnyard far away, but could ... if we denizens of a finer and more modern farm are content to languish in bovine complacency... most terribly and swiftly happen in our own back yard.

Directed by George Ritchie