I am sure George Orwell, born originally as Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari in British India in 1903, liked a good sing song.
And like his son Richard, he would have been enchanted and entertained by Peter Cordwell and Carl Picton’s musical.
As George was a writer who wanted to craft his political writing into an art-form, he would have smiled and chuckled at the way the drama and lyrics in One Georgie Orwell explain how and why he wanted the world to be a fairer and more decent place.
This is particularly so for the down-trodden and the working classes even though Orwell confessed that he himself was lower-upper middle class and while striving to be a democratic socialist enjoyed recalling how between 1927 and 1934 he self-identified as a Tory anarchist.
There is always something self-deprecating with waves of gentle irony in Orwell’s writing. This may have been because he was something of a maverick and social paradox; an outsider in his own class and, inevitably, an outsider in the class he wanted to understand, respect and celebrate.
One of his English comrades during the Spanish Civil War remembers the pleasure he gained when he could hum to Orwell and remind him of the music to the Eton boating song so that the gangly six feet two-inch tall volunteer with size twelve feet could carry on strolling ahead with rifle over his shoulder and humming:
‘Jolly boating weather, And a hay harvest breeze, Blade on the feather,
Shade off the trees, Swing swing together…’
Orwell’s most powerful expression of song- like lyricism in his writing is his original creation of the revolutionary song for animals ‘Beasts of England’ in Animal Farm.
In one of his books of essays, The Lion and the Unicorn, he speculated that one of the reasons there had not been a full revolution by the English working class is that its socialist movement had failed to con- jure a rallying song ‘with a catchy tune – nothing like La Marseillaise or La Cucuracha.’
I do not think it is any coincidence that Orwell should write in Animal Farm that ‘Beasts of England’ should be sung to ‘a stirring tune, something between Clementine and La Cucuracha.’
And if you hum his lyrics you might well find the experience becomes an ear-worm and the next time you encounter pigs, donkeys, horses, chickens and any other farm animals you won’t have any difficulty giving it a full performance:
Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken to my joyful tidings
Of the golden future time.
Soon or late the day is coming, Tyrant Man shall be o’erthrown, And the fruitful fields of England Shall be trod by beasts alone.
You may well get some funny looks from the animals and perhaps belting out the Internationale might prove more inspiring. But Beasts of England is part of the fun of Animal Farm as a fable steeped in irony and parody. And the musical One Georgie Orwell is a brilliant and fun-laden way of getting into Orwell and finding out what he was all about in terms of his biography and writings.
The Orwell Society raged about it when it was produced and performed in the Greenwich Theatre more than a decade ago. The late founder of the Orwell Society Dione Venables was a great enthusiast for it. She recognised how it made Orwell’s legacy relevant and accessible beyond the academic and scholarly realm.
It has been seen and heard in America with a run at Teatro LATEA in New York’s Lower East Side be- tween October and November 2014, and very much in tune with the twenty first century, the songs have been presented by the Orwell Society for Christmas 2024.
It was also my privilege to introduce a live per- formance and production of One Georgie Orwell at the George Orwell Studies conference exploring 70 years since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four hosted by Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019.
The drama, lyrics and music remind me of the folk ballad and carnivalesque tradition of political theatre.
Peter Cordwell’s lyrics and the music by Carl Pic- ton and Bill Crow give voice to and speak for the people Orwell himself wanted to advocate for in his writing and that, of course, is very much at the heart of what has been celebrated as the ‘Crystal Spirit’ of George Orwell.
DoubleSpeak 