On dangerous ground

All Animal Farm adaptations are satirical, but the Palestinian and South African stage plays were more daring than others

Orwell’s novella Animal Farm turns 80 in about a month. In my book George Orwell on Screen, I looked at the making of two very different film versions – the first British feature-length cartoon, funded as anti-communist propaganda by the CIA in 1954, and the animatronic Hallmark TV movie from 1999. Goodness knows when I’ll see the Andy Serkis version, which apparently came out in France recently.

Adaptations of Orwell’s fable have a more illustrious history on the stage. Sir Peter Hall famously dramatised it for the UK’s National Theatre in 1984, while Alan Lyddiard’s ensemble production for Northern Stage toured for several years in the 1990s and keeps being revived. Audiences never seem to tire of watching pigs lead a farmyard revolt, only to become even more despotic than human beings.

The book was a satire on Stalinism, but the universal theme of revolutionaries selling out the populace can be tweaked according to circumstance. To stage it as a play in London or Newcastle-upon-Tyne – or, for that matter, New York – is all very well. Audiences can safely stroke their chins and forget about it the next day. But in other parts of the world, the message hits closer to home.

Take for example the Kenyan theatre group who in 1991 thought that residents of Kangemi, a Nairobi slum, would appreciate an East African spin on the story, known locally as Shamba La Wanyama. This didn’t happen, because a government official revoked their performance licence in advance.

In Jenin, a West Bank refugee camp, drama students were at least able to put on a Palestinian version in 2009. The Freedom Theatre’s artistic director, Juliano Mer-Khamis, had originally planned to stage Martin McDonagh’s satire of armed resistance in Ireland, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, but changed his mind after someone smashed his car window.

In the event, the back-up plan of Animal Farm proved nearly as controversial – and when a Palestinian cultural foundation turned down his request for funding, it fell to the British diplomatic mission in Jerusalem to stump up the cash.

The son of a Jewish Israeli mother and a Christian Palestinian father, Mer-Khamis gave up a successful career as a stage and screen actor in Israel to run the beleaguered, 250-seat theatre-cum-drama school. Overwhelmingly, his sympathies were with the Palestinians, who’d lived under Israeli occupation from 1967’s Six-Day War to the Palestinian Authority’s establishment in 1994.

But he wasn’t blind to the PA’s rampant corruption under President Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Fatah party – nor to the growing appeal of its militant rival Hamas, especially among the young. “We lack a culture of criticism. We lack a culture of free thinking,” he told the Associated Press in 2009.

Animal Farm, written and directed by Nabil al-Raee, was the venue’s widely publicised debut show. Amid a flurry of phone calls and texts that accused theatre staff of being spies, bent on corrupting the young, a fundamentalist tried to raze it to the ground a few days before the first performance. As luck would have it, a small pool of water near the doorway stopped the blaze from spreading.

Those who wished to smother the play at birth rightly surmised that, by Palestinian standards, it would be outrageously cheeky. Muslim clerics, members of the Palestinian security services and the mayor of Jenin attended its opening night. Before long, it was drawing busloads of visitors from Ramallah, Bethlehem and even Israel.

Seeing cruel Farmer Jones overthrown, the packed-out theatre cheered to the animals’ cries of ‘intifada!’ In the tale of corruption and collaboration that followed, the topical references were bold, to say the least. The pigs didn’t just stand on their hind legs, as they do in the novel; they learned Hebrew, set dogs on their opponents, shot so-called informers and, by the end, were smoking cigars and cutting deals with Israeli officials.

There were nervous titters too at the antics of Napoleon, Stalin-esque leader of the pigs. A portrait of himself in Jones’s house showed him in a dark suit and striped tie, like many a politician’s photo in Palestinian government offices. Meanwhile his two canine security guards dressed in black and wielded Kalashnikovs, in the style of the PA’s security forces.

The dialogue was equally as pointed. “The corruption here is worse than when Jones was in control,” complained Molly the mare, fleeing the pigs’ tyranny.

Yet Mer-Khamis denied that the play was an attack on Fatah per se. It was more about how power corrupts in general. “That’s what is beautiful about theatre, everyone can interpret it in his own way,” he told UAE-based paper The National. “I don’t think that the PA are pigs. I think the PA is caught in a situation that affects all of us.”

Two years later, as the 52-year-old was driving his babysitter and one-year-old son out of the theatre’s courtyard, a masked man flagged the car down and emptied seven bullets into him. By the time he reached a hospital, Mer-Khamis was dead.

After Mandela

Thanks in part to the late Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress (ANC), post-apartheid South Africa is a functioning democracy that guarantees free expression in its Bill of Rights. In 1994, Mandela’s peaceful election as president seemed like a political miracle as he oversaw the end of white minority rule. Since then, however, the revolution has taken an Orwellian turn – in terms of politicians’ conduct, at any rate.

During his nine years as president, starting in 2009, Jacob Zuma faced one scandal after another. Accused of racketeering and corruption, charged with rape (and acquitted), and the subject of numerous motions of no confidence in parliament and within the ANC, he built up an image that is a world away from Mandela’s perceived saintliness.

One notable scandal involved Nkandla, his private homestead in rural KwaZulu-Natal, which the government upgraded at great cost. According to a subsequent investigation, an amphitheatre, cattle kraal, chicken run and swimming pool (said to be a reservoir for firefighting, or “fire pool”) could in no circumstances be classed as security features.

Meanwhile on Twitter, a meme captured South Africans’ imagination in 2015. In March, a Cape Town university student threw human faeces at a statue of colonialist Cecil Rhodes, inspiring sympathetic protests and a hashtag, #RhodesMustFall. The suffix caught on, leading to the student-based #FeesMustFall movement, followed by #ZumaMustFall – a reaction to the rand’s collapse as a currency.

It was during these turbulent times that a theatrical Animal Farm, filled with sly references that only South Africans could truly appreciate, took the country by storm. Written and directed by a white man, and with a cast of five immensely talented black women, it began in school halls as a study aid for children. Reworked for adult audiences, this extraordinary collaborative effort quickly became a national sensation.

So relevant

Neil Coppen, the award-winning playwright, was at that point best known for Tin Bucket Drum, a whimsical, allegorical tale about a young African girl. Weaving together elements of magical realism, live percussion, Kabuki theatre and shadow puppetry, Tin Bucket Drum triumphed at the 2010 National Arts Festival. Within a couple of years, it was garnering rave reviews from critics in New York.

In 2014, the touring company ShakeXperience, which focused mainly on education in theatre, commissioned Coppen to create a new version of Animal Farm that would bring the story alive and help young South Africans to understand its themes. “When we open a newspaper in the morning, we see Animal Farm on every page,” the writer said later.

“Whether it’s international or local, we see the same things playing out. Orwell really pins down something extremely universal and profound and I think the story still speaks to us all these years down the line. We certainly, having put it in a South African context, have found so much relevant material that we can work with.”

Coppen hadn’t studied the book at school, but had read it while travelling around South America as an adult. During a 36-hour bus trip in Peru, he’d recognised the tale’s theatrical potential – and since he hadn’t seen a stage or screen version of it, felt confident he could craft a play that wasn’t derivative. Tin Bucket Drum, he noted, “had dealt with very similar ‘Orwellian’ themes”.

To make the story more African, he changed Mr Jones to Maneer Joubert and rewrote the animals’ anthem, Beasts of England, as Beasts of Africa. Close collaboration with his cast strengthened the project further. “I love working with powerful women who teach me about the country I live in,” he told SABC’s breakfast television show in 2015. “It’s a conversation – we all bring ideas to the room and discuss it and we create a version that we feel comfortable with and that we’re proud of.”

During an audition process that lasted more than three months, Coppen saw hundreds of actors, male and female. After a while, he became convinced he could get away with an all-female production, so called back the best actresses he’d seen for improvisation, physical theatre, text and accent work.

“They were put through a barnyard bootcamp to get the roles,” he explained. With such a physically and vocally demanding show, “I needed to know they would be able to survive the experience and deliver top-notch performances each time”.

Tired of seeing South African women play submissive, subservient roles, he seized the opportunity to subvert what he called “lazy and reductive typecasting”. The final cast – Khutjo Bakunzi-Green (as Boxer), Zesuliwe Hadebe (Clover), Tshego Khutsoane (Napoleon), MoMo Matsunyane (Snowball), Mpume Mthombene (Napoleon in other performances) and Mandisa Nduna (Squealer) – helped with research and brought their ideas and influences into the rehearsal room.

“We had rehearsals for a month and we literally called it a bootcamp because we were at rehearsal Monday to Sunday, every day from 9am to 5pm,” said Hadebe. Like her castmates, she was playing a variety of roles, the principal one being Clover – “a stout motherly mare approaching middle life”, as Orwell describes her.

The adaptation’s narrators are Clover and Muriel the goat (played by Matsunyane). Hadebe saw them as the older generation of South African women, reminding children in the audience fondly of their aunts, mothers and grandmothers.

Rehearsal days were split into two, with Daniel Buckland, the renowned choreographer and Cirque du Soleil performer, assigning physical work in the morning. Afternoons were reserved for the text.

A deeper cut

It wasn’t long before South Africa’s theatrical community sat up and took notice of the play. The Naledi Theatre Awards, its equivalent of the Tonys or the Oliviers, named it best ensemble and best production for young audiences in 2014. By August of 2015, it was playing to grown-ups at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, where its pointed political references – a joke about fire pools here, a grim reminder of the police massacring striking miners there – would be well understood.

By now, Ayanda Khala-Phiri, a drama lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, had seen the play in Pietermaritzburg. To her, it cleverly articulated the shift from “the hope and promise of a better future to the deep disillusionment experienced when at the expected time of harvest, the fruits of freedom and equality remain inaccessible to ordinary people… You sit in the theatre and think, ‘Yes, it’s a deeper cut when you are betrayed and then oppressed by one of your own.’”

Lesley Stones, for the Daily Maverick news website, was so besotted with what she saw in Johannesburg, she wished the show could be staged in the Pretoria parliament. “The trappings of good living appear gradually,” she wrote. “A beret at first, then a uniform. A pair of bling sunspecs, a bottle of booze in the pocket. A raised box to speak from, then a podium and a megaphone.”

When Muriel and Clover discussed a rumour that the pigs were building a swimming pool, the audience fell about laughing. “Oh, so many allegories to our own flawed revolution, so much to think about,” Stones commented.

For his part, Coppen was dazed by the show’s success, describing it as a career highlight. Boasting packed-out houses and a total audience of more than 60,000 at that time – not to mention standing ovations at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown – it had served as a reminder that South African political theatre had a vital function and a hungry audience.

The actresses were rock stars, he added. “During the last run at the Market, we had so many repeat viewings from audience members, coming to the show two or three times, that the cast would walk out onstage in the opening scene and be met by this rapturous applause and cheering.”

Eighty years after its publication, Animal Farm’s most subversive quality may be its portability. Sometimes, the most dangerous act you can perform is simply to hold up a mirror.