Review on ‘Animal Farm’ By Sharon Acres
Tonight I had the pleasure of enjoying ‘Animal Farm’ by Peter Hall at the Thameside Theatre, Grays, performed by Stageability Actors School. Altogether I thought this was a great show.
I was very impressed with tonight’s young actors who performed with such great enjoyment and emphasis on their individual characters of farmers and various animals to an audience who seemed to be fully engaged from start to finish. It was good to see such professional young actors taking on such a challenging play about the Russian Revolution and understanding many difficult themes throughout such as: equality, authority, controversy and the main theme of animalism, and managing to express it well.
I very much enjoyed the portrayal of one character in particular, Muriel, who played the goat. Muriel, I noticed adapted perfectly to her character and had great concentration throughout on both her characterisation and reactions to other characters while on stage, enabling the audience to feel a sense of realism within her character.
A great first impression was formed on stage by the use of a creative rusty set design of a farm, clearly indentifying the setting for the audience, automatically helping us with the understanding of the play. Although some parts of the stage seemed to be a little crowded at times due to quite a few actors performing on stage at once, which lead me sometimes in to confusion as to which character was on who’s side, particularly towards the end when categorizing the humans from the animals.
However the majority of strong performances within the play, and excellent use of symbolism within their costumes suggesting exactly who they are, I was able to continue enjoying and understanding a great successful play.
Altogether, this was a great experience for me, and I definitely recommend this show to anybody who is in the mood to enjoy something a little bit different.
