Review: Animal Farm, As Witnessed By Moses the Raven

Sophie Winch on Edgware actor Dov Citron’s new take on the George Orwell classic

A man with a beard and moustache in black a hat and black suit, against a black background — Dov Citron as Moses the Raven

Last week, Dov Citron took his one-man play Animal Farm, As Witnessed By Moses the Raven to Barons Court Theatre in West London.

Based on George Orwell’s 1945 allegorical novel about the Russian Revolution and directed by Victoria Waddington, the Edgware-based actor’s fresh and moving play tethers the story to Moses the Raven as a narrator.

You’ll arrive at Citron’s farm long before you take your seat. The stairway down to Barons Court Theatre from the upstairs bar is covered in propagandic posters, faded pig’s faces and hand-scrawled slogans. The entire theatre is the stage; you sit among farm machinery and posters, watching a sparse space littered with straw.

Before the lights are up, Farmer Jones stumbles drunkenly into the audience and collapses. When he stands again, he is the titular Moses, stoic and solemn. Citron shifts again and again, from Snowball (played as a timelessly recognisable affably posh pedagogue) to Napoleon (laconic and terrifying) to the workhorse Boxer (slow-minded and very moving).

Citron’s talent is not only in shapeshifting, but in his comfort with negative space. He commands the room by standing alone in it, at times prop-free and silent. Beyond his desire to entertain (which he certainly achieves) is a deeper need to reach the minds of his audience.

This is where his titular addition comes into its own; Moses imbues the play with a cyclical sense of warning. “This story has been told a thousand times,” he says, “and, I have no doubt, it will be told a thousand more”.

There’s an economy to Citron’s physicality; he rarely crawls on all fours. Boxer stands hunched, one hand raised to the side of his head as an ear. Snowball’s eloquent speeches are punctuated occasionally by eerily realistic porcine squeals and grunts.

These are not comic figures, but you are constantly reminded that they are inhuman. The only time this falls a little flat is at the end; major players like Snowball and Napoleon lose most of their animal traits early, and so the final revelation that in the eyes of outsiders the pigs resemble humans is dullened. Overall, though, the balance is maintained; his characters feel idiosyncratic and lived-in, at once human and other.

This restraint carries through to other aspects of the production. Props are sparse and meaningful; the pointer Snowball uses to indicate the doctrines of Animalism is a drumstick also used to make the sound of Farmer Jones’ guns.

Most characters are distinguished by hats: a bowler hat for Napoleon, ingeniously, a newsboy cap for Squealer (who represents the Russian newspapers). A raven pendant worn throughout establishes the constant tether to Moses as our narrator. Hanging wooden signs proclaim the doctrines of animalism, under which are blank ones.

When flipped, they show the later amendments characters make to them. Nothing is added to or permanently taken away from the set; nothing leaves the stage, and one gets the unnerving impression that these signs could be flipped backwards and forwards indefinitely, as the story is reversed and retold over and over again.

Citron’s Animal Farm conveys all of the most vital messages of the original. It is thought-provoking, unsettling and urgent; a powerful warning of how easily history could repeat itself. Funny, moving, stark and thought-provoking, it succeeds on many levels.

You can follow Dov Citron @dovcitron_actor on Instagram, or on his website at www.dovcitron.co.uk

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