Animal Farm review: Orwell mapped on to Belfast in intriguing anatomy of oppression

Animal Farm The Mac, Belfast ????? “There is an expectation that we’re forced to labour with every atom of our bodies,” says someone, in a rallying cry, early in Tinderbox Theatre Company’s latest production. That may sound like the passionate indignation of socialism, in our era of organised trade unions and collective bargaining. It may also be familiar as dialogue spoken by a porcine leader in Animal Farm, George Orwell’s novella from 1945. Such is the efficiency of Orwell’s allegory – which maps a farm animals’ uprising in rural England into the birth of the Russian Revolution, and its unsettling…