An Australian Animal Farm

You’ve adapted some iconic texts at Bloomshed, including Pride and Prejudice, The Importance of Being Ernest, Paradise Lost and now Animal Farm. How do you find a new way into texts that have been adapted many times over their history? 

Our process of adaptation is about staying true to the ‘spirit’ of the original work while creating something new and reflective of the now. Going into the adaptation process, we’re always thinking about how the original text might speak to an Australian audience. It might be a particular take like, ‘What if the Garden of Eden was an Amazon warehouse?’ Or else it’s about mapping a contemporary issue onto a classic, like smashing the Australian housing market into Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. For us, it’s about striking a balance between the original text and the issues we’re invested in. We don’t see the original as a vehicle to say what we want to say. Rather, it’s about boiling a story down into its allegorical basis so that it can be ‘read’ in a particular way. We’re led by contemporary social and political issues as much as by comedy, a desire to undercut the original in some humorous way and an interest in making challenging and complex works accessible to everyone.

Animal Farm is a famous political satire, and your adaptation gives it a decidedly Australian flavour. What about our current political environment lends itself to this fable?

We set ourselves the challenge of seeing how a story about the horrors of Russian totalitarianism could map onto the Australian experience. So it’s not a critique of so-called ‘communism’, as it is so often read, but a critique of crony capitalism. Australia isn’t known for its secret police, mass arrests and gulag archipelago. But that doesn’t mean that these features, in distorted mirror image, aren’t there. The movements of power are just more hidden, made surreptitious through legalese, NDAs and the shonky practices of private enterprise. Throughout this project, we held Orwell close to our hearts even when our minds were turned towards Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I think we were ultimately reaching for a ‘Huxwellian’ synthesis, even if we didn’t realise it. This would describe a society that uses both carrot and stick to keep the masses under control: police violence and rampant consumerism, explicit brainwashing and gentle tranquilisation, mass surveillance and constant mass media distraction. If we boil Animal Farm down to its core, it’s about a bunch of greedy pigs who want more of everything. You don’t have to look far to see those same pigs running the show.

How did you approach bringing the farmyard animal characters of the text to life on stage?

Initially we were hesitant to physically perform as ‘animals’ at all. Instead we wrote characters who had animal-like characteristics in their speech and thoughts. A really stupid chicken. A sheep that kept following everyone. A pony who was obsessed (and I mean obsessed) with how they looked. Humans have been using animals to describe particular characteristics for thousands of years, so it was fairly straightforward to work out what each represented. We wanted to avoid the pantomime style of going all out with our ‘animality’, using fake noses and such. The animals had to feel like they were human. But when we staged it, it felt like something was missing, so we adopted a physical style that offered the ‘mere whiff’ of animal: a way of holding the hands, a chicken-like look in the eye or the frumpy gait of a sheep. It was about finding a balance between animal and human so that the audience never lost sight of the allegory.

If we boil Animal Farm down to its core, it’s about a bunch of greedy pigs who want more of everything. You don’t have to look far to see those same pigs running the show.

When adapting from well-known sources, how do you decide how faithful to remain to the original text? 

The best bit about adapting classics is that we know they work dramatically. They’re always entertaining. There’s always going to be something that draws us to them. The hard bit is that they’re mired in their context. Paradise Lost and the English Civil War. The Importance of Being Earnest and Victorian high society. Animal Farm and the rise of Stalin. It’s a lot easier to adapt allegories, and I think we work best when we’re able to condense the original into that form because allegories remain open to infinite readings. We try, as much as we can, to stay true to the original story, structure and characters, because these are the bits that we know ‘work.’ But we’re also trying to balance that with the ideas or concepts that we’re trying to inject into the work. We’re absolutely willing to depart from the original—completely in some instances, like pitting Blanche DuBois against Stanley Kowalski in A Dodgeball Named Desire. But I think our best works are those that manage to say something which the original author would say had they lived in our times.

 Orwell’s original novel was published in 1945. What do you think he would make of the world today?

Orwell seemed to be interested in critiquing a very specific form of state power—of concrete blocks, surveillance and police brutality. Had he been alive today, I believe he would have been taken in (as so many were) by the idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union would herald a new dawn of perpetual and global democracy. It’s impossible to tell, but I think we would find the Orwell of today writing about systems of oppression that he recognises: a form of governance that colloquially (if incorrectly) is called ‘communism’. On the other hand, the (uncredited) co-author of Animal Farm, Eileen Blair (née O’Shaughnessy) might have been significantly more critical of our Western democratic system and the influence that private corporations have on our daily lives. My hunch is that the fabulous vibrancy we find in Animal Farm was O’Shaughnessy’s doing. Anyone who can imagine a world where oppression coexists with vivid technicolour, an illusion of bounty and endless ‘on demand’ entertainment, is primed to critique the late-stage capitalist, techno-feudal order of today.

Animal Farm is on at the Arts Centre, Melbourne, 12–22 August 2026. Book now.