George Orwell's Coming Up For Air

Seasoned actor and comedian Hal Cruttenden, who also gigs this year with his Climb Every Molehill, takes us back to the agitated Britain of 1938, where bombers adorn London’s sky and join the dentist, school fees and boiled cabbage in their numbing assault on George Bowling’s sense of being.

The forty-something year old insurance worker and father of two leads a hideously monotonous life and has reached a point where he knows, with damning confidence, that the kind of excitement that sweetened his childhood will never return. A chance interruption to his mechanical everyday cycle offers him a chance to escape the entrapment. However, it’s not just Bowling but the world that has changed, and the things of his dreams just don’t exist anymore.

The short stage adaptation of the 1939 original has transferred well with Daily Telegraph critic Dominic Cavendish’s pen adeptly echoing that Orwellian pathos of the novel – the wise, self-conscious individual struggling to keep afloat in the shifting tides of the times. Clocking in at just under an hour it’s a pleasant length for a monologue, though, ultimately, its brevity denies a full exploration of a time past and undermines the grandeur of a historically significant piece of literature. An absence of visual aids or elaborate stagecraft reinforces the narrator’s drab life, but doesn’t help to rejuvenate an old story. A sophisticated little number, yes, but it would probably be best just to read the book, which isn’t too long itself.