Charles Hutchinson reviews Year Of The Rat

9:38am Saturday 15th March 2008

HISTORY has it that George Orwell was going to call his futuristic final work 1948 - the year he wrote it - until his publisher suggested 1984. Not so in Roy Smiles's biographical play, where Orwell says he chose 1984 as it would be a Year Of The Rat, to tie in with the rat cage in Room 101.

Orwell does so while conversing with Paul Kemp's debonair Rat, one of three literary creations - along with the stoical horse Boxer and sneering Stalinist Pig - that drop in on the melancholic writer as he leaves behind London to complete his novel in an austere cottage on the Hebridean island of Jura.

Smiles travelled into the recesses of the psyche previously in 2004's Ying Tong, but whereas that portrait of Goon Spike Milligan was a study of mental illness, here Hugo Speer's hoarse-voiced, stiff-limbed Orwell is physically troubled by enervating tuberculosis and, in Smiles's surrealist comedy drama, by a need to consummate his crush on London literati femme fatale Sonia Brownell (Claudia Elmhirst).

In reality, Brownell never visited Jura, and nor did Orwell's old Etonian friend, the larger-than-life, womanising essayist Cyril Connolly (Nicholas Blane), but Smiles's romanticised play imagines Connolly "just passing by" to save Orwell from heartbreak by trying to seduce Brownell himself with a flash of his downstairs.

Connolly says he never lets reality interfere with a quip, a philosophy that applies equally to Smiles, a former stand-up who whips up a sometimes strained aphorism at every opportunity, when darkness stalks the lonely, tortured Orwell. "All your books are bleak," says Sonia. "I can't write any other way," he retorts.

Smiles could be talking about himself with that latter comment. His first inclination is for a sceptical gag in a battle of worn wits between two men equally troubled by an oppressive sense of failure: a theme that merited deeper exploration, but that would have sacrificed the sparring comedy. Alan Strachan's urbane direction elicits fine performances but Year Of The Rat is less substantial or revelatory than it might have been, typically staving off the bleakness with a jaunty jazz dance at the finale (a sort of Orwell that ends well).

Year Of The Rat, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until April 5. Box office: 0113 213 7700.

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