Burnt Coffee’s production of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows sees an ensemble of eight performers play over thirty characters in this hugely enjoyable, up to date version of the much-loved classic.
The inventiveness of the physical comedy in this performance was outstanding. Props are used in unexpected ways and the scenes on the riverbank, the wild wood and on the river itself are brought to life with the use of simple but effective techniques. The whole thing has a playfulness and sometimes even silliness that works brilliantly with the text.
This is not a traditional performance of Grahame’s story – new characters are introduced (I particularly enjoyed the performance of the actor who played the slightly sinister Newt, Lady Toad’s butler/factotum) and some tweaks are made to the plot, particularly the ending which I have to say worked magnificently. At first I thought that the script might have wandered too far from the Edwardian pastoral comedy of the original story, captured so well in AA Milne’s stage version, Toad of Toad Hall, but I should not have worried – the spirit of the source material is treated with respect and all the changes work really well.
It’s unfair to call out any particular performances in such a strong ensemble cast, but I am going to anyway. Vanessa McAuley’s Lady Toad was magnificently amphibious and brought the mischievous and obsessive character to life every time she appeared.
There are two more chances to catch this production – Tuesday 27th and Wednesday 28th August 2024 at Norwich’s Maddermarket theatre. I saw this production at Colchester’s intimate Headgate theatre – it will be interesting to see what the cast do with the larger performance space at the Maddermarket. Parents should note that with a run time of around two hours (with an interval) this might not be suitable for pre-school children, but anyone of reception age and above will be enchanted by this energetic and inventive production.
Yes, Burmese Days is flawed. But I would argue it is overdue a re-evaluation. As a portrait of colonialism it is not quite as devastating as, say, Heart of Darkness, one of the more obvious influences on an inexperienced writer. But it is powerful and effective, and tells us a lot about the early formation of Orwell the author.
Orwell was in his late twenties when Burmese Days was published, first in the US in 1934 and the following year in a a slightly redacted form in the UK, redacted because his publisher was worried about potential libel suits. It was his first novel. Early drafts date back to 1928, shortly after he had resigned his commission in the Burmese Military Police and decided to become a writer.
His first four novels, (Burmese Days, 1934, Coming Up for Air, 1939, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936, and A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) form a coherent group. They are naturalistic novels of ideas, with a central character loosely based on Orwell himself, each with significant autobiographical components. They are a world apart from Animal Farm, which itself is utterly distinct in form and style from 1984. At some point in the 1940’s Orwell developed from being a moderately successful jobbing writer/journalist to one of our finest novelists. What caused that transformation (some speculate it was the influence of his first wife) is unclear. But there’s little trace of the later author in the earlier novels. I am not sure it helps to see them through that lens – i.e. as just early Orwell novels. They are more than that.
Burmese Days is a passionate anti-colonialism novel, written by someone with a detailed knowledge of the Raj and a love of Burmese people and culture. Set in 1920s British Burma (which at the time was part of India), it follows long-term ex-patriate John Flory, a timber merchant, part of a small group of hard-drinking, embittered English settlers. There are some Burmese characters, but they principally serve as plot devices rather than being fully-fleshed real people. In particular U Po Kyin, a corrupt Burmese magistrate, is a one-dimensional monstrous figure without any redeeming features, evilly plotting to destroy the reputation of his nemesis, Dr Veraswami, an archetype of the ‘good’ Indian. The British characters are not much more rounded – they are
Flory has been in Burma for fifteen years, and has become incredibly jaded. He has a Burmese concubine Ma Hla May (“He had bought her from her parents two years ago“) which is an open secret amongst his British compatriots. Flory has a birthmark on his face which dominates his perception of himself – he thinks women find him ugly and unattractive. He finds it hard to form relationships with the British people and feels increasingly isolated. The arrival of Elizabeth Lackersteen, the orphaned niece of the manager of the local timber firm, fleetingly promises the possibility of a conventional relationship. They grow close as he shows her some of the sights of the Burmese countryside, but she is appallingly shallow and vapid, and is at best confused by his appreciation of Burmese culture. Initially it appears Elizabeth might be prepared to marry Flory given her very limited options and to escape the advances of her drunken uncle. But her affections are quickly transferred to Verrall, a handsome military police lieutenant new to the area. To spoil any chance of Flory’s relationship with Elizabeth surviving, her aunt tells her that Flory has a Burmese mistress, which is of course true. Verrall leaves without saying goodbye to Elizabeth and she quickly pivots back towards her original romance with Flory.
A sub-plot sees U Po Kyin’s attempt to prevent Dr Veraswami joining the local European Club (“In any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain.”). U Po Kyin foils the plan for Dr Veraswami to be elected by fomenting a small-scale rebellion of the locals against British rule.
So what’s wrong with Burmese Days, and why is it worth reading anyway? The characters are entirely one-dimensional, with the exception of Flory who is a thinly disguised self-portrait (as to a greater or lesser extent are all Orwell’s main characters, even the eponymous Clergyman’s Daughter.) (I thought I would illustrate this point – that Flory is a self-portrait – with an example; towards the end of the novel Flory pays a social visit to his neighbours and is shown into the house and asked to wait while the person he is visiting – Elizabeth – is fetched. Orwell describes this situation thus: “Mrs Lackersteen left him standing up in the drawing-room, feeling lumpish and abnormally large as one does at such times”. Not everyone feels this way but one can easily imagine the very tall and slightly socially awkward Orwell would.)
The obese and sexually predatory U Po Kyin is an archetypal, comic book villain; Elizabeth is little more than a plot device; the thinly sketched other ex-patriates are angry, entitled racists. The plot is clumsy and predictable, and the novel’s ending is probably its worst feature, showing every sign of simply being a rushed way of ending the book. Flory’s sudden decision at the end of the novel (trying to avoid spoilers here) makes no narrative sense and appears a way of bringing matters to a close, the novelist perhaps working to a publisher’s deadline or just being bored with the whole thing!
What of the novel’s redeeming features? For a start we get a really clear, unambiguous picture of the source of Orwell’s anti-imperialism. There is a strong argument to be made that this in turn is the source of his socialism, and explains why he always kept coming back to his time in Burma. I’ve written before why it is wrong to see Orwell’s time here as a short intermission after Eton and before the interesting bits of his biography. He spent longer in the Burmese Military Police than he did in any other job he held for the rest of his life and obviously tried hard to make a success of the job. Orwell the writer was formed in the heat of Burma. He writes with passion about the corrosive impact of being part of an imperialistic occupation:
“In the end the secrecy of your revolt poisons you like a secret disease. Your whole life is a life of lies. Year after year you sit in Kipling-haunted little Clubs, whisky to right of you, Pink’un to left of you, listening and eagerly agreeing while Colonel Bodger develops his theory that these bloody Nationalists should be boiled in oil. You hear your Oriental friends called ‘greasy Little babus’, and you admit, dutifully, that they are greasy little babus. You see louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants. The time comes when you burn with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long for a native rising to drown their Empire in blood.
This is as fine as anything in A Hanging or Shooting an Elephant.
The other feature of the novel that I enjoyed was the quality of the descriptive writing, not something Orwell is particularly well known for. His prose style may have been still developing, and here is more florid than it would eventually become, but the evocation of the Burmese countryside and especially the stifling heat is very well done:
“North of Mandalay the train, fuelled with wood, crawled at twelve miles an hour across a vast, parched plain, bounded at its remote edges by blue rings of hills. White egrets stood poised, motionless, like herons, and piles of drying chilis gleamed crimson in the sun. Sometimes a white pagoda rose from the plains like the breast of a supine giantess. The early tropic night settled down, and the train jolted on, slowly, stopping at little stations where barbaric yells sounded from the darkness”.
Finally, I thought I would share with you this gem. Goodreads one star reviews are often worth a laugh, but this one was special:
“This was my first George Orwell novel read as an adult, having somehow managed to avoid reading 1989 in high school like everyone else.”
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, 2022
Don’t be misled by the Shakespearean reference in this novel’s title – any Macbeth-related themes such as ambition are introduced late in the day and add little to the narrative overall. Which is a pity, because without the attempt to be more academic than it otherwise is, Tomorrow (etc) is a perfectly readable portrait of the durable friendship between two millennial gamers.
The novel opens with Sam Masur and Sadie Green meeting on the underground in Boston (at least I think it was Boston, my knowledge of New England geography is a little shaky). We find out that they are old friends who have drifted apart. The novel then jumps back in time to show us when they first met. Sadie is visiting her sister who is being treated for leukaemia. In the same hospital Sam is having reconstructive surgery on his foot, crushed in the crash that killed his mother. They bond over a shared love of video games and Sadie’s visits to Sam become an important part of his extended recovery. Visiting Sam in hospital counts as community service for Sadie, something she doesn’t tell him about as she is slightly embarrassed about it. Eventually he finds out, and is upset and understandably angry, and their friendship is ruptured.
Once reunited, older and wiser, the pair begin working on a computer game, inspired by their mutual love of gaming and supported by their friend Marx. Sadie starts a relationship with her married lecturer, Dov, the nearest thing the novel has to a villain. Their game – Ichigo – about a child lost at sea, is a huge success. A seed of resentment is sown when journalists assume that Sam is the inspiration for the character of Ichigo and give him more credit than Sadie feels is due. This festers and eventually cases a rift between the two, although not for several years, during which time the company they found, Unfair Games, (with Marx as their manager) moves to the West Coast and becomes commercially very successful.
Unfair Games diversifies into world-building and non-combat games, and Sadie begins work on a solo project, a Shakespearean-themed game. I’m going to leave the plot summary there (about halfway through the novel) to avoid spoilers, but I don’t think I am giving too much away when I say that Sadie and Sam’s friendship dominates the rest of the novel. I am sure there are plenty of novels about the early days of gaming, but this was the first I have come across/read. The notorious misogyny of this environment is a secondary theme in the novel, but most people are fairly nice – with one dramatic exception there is little of the toxicity exposed in, for example, gamergate. Even Dov, an exploitative and arrogant philanderer, is not condemned by the other characters and shows some development when he returns to the novel near the close.
I know this is going to sound strange but this felt like a young adult novel for grown-ups. What do I mean by that? Well, it has a lot of young adult themes; it follows the characters through their teenage years and into adulthood, coming to terms with the world as technological change accelerates around them. Friendship is as important as love, and casual relationships are unproblematic. I wasn’t at all surprised that the author also writes YA novels – you can tell. At the same time the novel is strangely old-fashioned – because it is set in the 1990’s (at first) in the early days of computer gaming, the author gives the period setting authenticity by numerous references to things such as Magic Eye books (where you stare at a pattern and an image emerges, or not) and Donkey Kong. The novel concludes with a chapter written from the perspective of a character in one of Sadie and Sam’s games. I am sure this was conceived as a neat way of breaking the fourth wall and bringing the plot to a conclusion, but I would have put a big red line through had I been Zevin’s editor – it was ill-conceived and distracting.
I can easily see Tomorrow being adapted for television or film, where the medium would allow time to explore the world-building and the development of the relationships. The narrative structure would work well with a series of one hour episodes, which is another way of saying that the story-line was a little episodic – something happens, a few years pass, something else happens, etc. A stronger author would have crafted the storyline so the seams weren’t quite so obvious. Sam and Sadie, and actually Marx as well, secondary character though he is, are very well developed and believable people, and it was easy to become invested in their outcomes, even if a happy ever after ending was never really on the cards. Would I read more by this author? Possibly – I definitely will keep an eye out for their next book.
The Reading Bug 