Theatre
Michael Portillo - A battle lost
Published 14 June 2004
Theatre - A staging of George Orwell's classic fails to capture the lyrical power of the original, writes Michael Portillo
Homage to Catalonia
Teatre Romea, Barcelona
It requires an effort, strolling among the tourists on La Rambla in Barcelona today, to imagine the city in July 1936, when the workers seized control and factory owners were shot, or in June 1937, when the Stalinist Communist Party rounded up or liquidated the Marxists, accusing them of Trotskyism and of collaborating with General Francisco Franco. George Orwell lived through the bewildering events of 1937, and Homage to Catalonia is a wonderful attempt to explain the inexplicable.
In Spain, for most of the period since Franco's death, there has been little appetite for discussing the civil war, and the constitution makes those who committed atrocities in the old days immune from prosecution. More recently, especially in Catalonia, people have started to talk more about those times, and the Catalan government is to start exhuming 54 mass graves.
So this is an interesting time to bring the first stage version of Orwell's book to Barcelona. Five Catalan and five British actors speaking English, Catalan and Spanish perform in a show that has appeared already in Leeds, Newcastle and Paris. The premiere in the Catalan capital attracted a British minister of state, the president of the Catalan autonomous region and the city's mayor.
In truth, this multinational production, assisted by the British Council, seems to be as much a political event as a theatrical one. Certainly, it is interesting to see a play in three languages (not that my Catalan is very good). Many British people fought in the Spanish civil war, mainly on the Republican side, and it is worth celebrating that shared history. It is good to revive interest in Orwell's book, too, because it is a beautiful piece of writing, illustrating the bestiality of war and the humanity of those caught up in it. Written with scrupulous accuracy, it records the author's growing disillusionment with politics and appreciation of his fellow man.
The play is at its best when it lets Orwell do the talking. Craig Conway is a highly expressive first-person narrator who never falls into histrionics. He delivers perfectly the opening lines of the book in which Orwell describes meeting an illiterate Italian militiaman who instantly impresses him as noble and dependable. He sees him only for a moment and never again. The play ends with Conway reciting the book's closing lines, in which the author describes his return from the mayhem to a southern England that is apparently sleeping its way through Europe's growing catastrophe. "Don't worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday."
Between the play's start and finish, unfortunately, much goes wrong. My first objection was the tendency of the other actors to screech or sob their way through descriptive passages from the book. Homage to Catalonia is as power-ful as it is because it is so understated. It is a very English book. Orwell says that the probable murder of a friend in prison "is not a thing I can easily forgive". He writes about being shot through the neck because it "is very interesting and I think . . . worth describing in detail".
Some of the staging struck me as absurd. Where Orwell described a night assault on a fascist position, in which even the squelch of his boots in the mud risked alerting the enemy, the writers Pablo Ley and Allan Baker had all the soldiers yelling at each other, incidentally making unintelligible what was happening. The soldiers' boredom at the front led them to ask, as Orwell records: "When are we going to attack?" That is turned into a rock number with electric-guitar accompaniment. While still at the front, most of the male actors take their shirts off. This is not only pointless but misleading - Orwell devotes much space to describing how dreadful the cold in the trenches was no matter how many layers he wore.
Worst of all, the playwrights have inserted a scene in which a plummy Englishwoman telephones from the Republican line to the fascist enemy to agree a time for their next attack, and laments that her side has a man stuck in the barrel of a cannon who cannot be shifted even using "washing-up liquid". Where does that piece of nonsense come from? The audience in Barcelona laughed, but it had nothing to do with Orwell and shattered the atmosphere of the piece. The book's pitiable descriptions of the lack of blankets, coats, rifles and training make war quite ridiculous enough.
Again, why did the adaptors have one of the actors repeatedly yell: "Don't panic"? (Was this in ignorance of Corporal Jones in Dad's Army or in misplaced tribute?) Similarly, a transvestite nightclub artiste appeared irrelevantly on stage looking like a stray extra from Cabaret.
I admit the audience enjoyed the evening. For me, the main effect was to focus my attention on the quality of the original, and in large part my brief visit to Catalonia was a homage to George Orwell.
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