Playing far too short a season at the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, Shake & Stir’s Animal Farm is a remarkable piece of theatre. Adapting George Orwell’s Animal Farm is something that would intimidate most playwrights, but the three cast members who pulled this amazing work together have handled the challenge with amazing dexterity, delivering a performance that is intensely theatrical, deeply engaging and absolutely essential.

For those who, like me, deftly avoided reading Animal Farm in high school, the basic premise is that the animals on an English farm stage an uprising, overthrow the farmer, and establish a system of governance to allow the farm to continue to produce food for the benefit of the animals, rather than their former master. In this new order, the leaders slowly increase in greed and the other animals find themselves no better off.

Originally written in the context of twentieth century fears…

The rest of this post is published on Australian Stage.