Animal Farm performance

Animal Farm from W!ld Rice is the first theatre performance I saw for this year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival. In preparation for viewing this performance, I read George Orwell’s Animal Farm for the first time a month ago.

Six actors and actresses took the roles of various animals, and an actor may rotate among a few animal roles. They moved like animals, and they produced sounds made by pigs and horses and dogs. A seventh actor took all the human roles. The “animals” are without proper clothes, covered in rag-like pieces, with all their limbs showing. At the second last scene, they are fully dressed to drink champagne to celebrate human-animal cooperation. The most interesting props are air-conditioning ducts used to represent the Windmill and the horse slaughterer’s van. On the music, I managed to identify the tune usually played when Huang Feihong started his duel, and also the music for a Hokkien/Fujian song on working hard to get ahead in life, but with the lyrics replaced to praise Napolean. The Caucasian audience may like the few lines from My Way sung by Napolean when he was drunk and dragged off the stage.

The final scene portrayed a human feeding Clover and stroking her head. I don’t think this scene is in the book, but I couldn’t be entirely sure. The book has been returned to the library. This scene seems to tell me that human has the capacity to care or even love the animals as long as the animals are submissive. But the animals are no longer themselves when they have been dominated by humans.

The drama is worth watching. It is a faithful adaptation of the novel, and there are interesting choreography and movements.