Coming Up for Air by George Orwell, Studio Theatre at Kay Meek Centre, Nov. 16 to Nov. 25. Adapted and directed by Leslie Mildiner, starring Bernard Cuffling. For more information visit kaymeek.com.
George Orwell was sure he was going to die.
Just six months earlier the man who would write Animal Farm and 1984 reported to Spain to fight against fascism. But on May 20, 1937, a sniper shot him in the throat.
“I had never heard of a man or animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it,” Orwell would later write.
But the bullet hit a small gap between his trachea and carotid artery, passing through the back of his neck but missing his spine.
While he would give thanks to the “Spanish standard of marksmanship” for saving his life, Orwell also wrote about the thoughts he thought would be his last, and his “violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well.”
While convalescing in Morocco, Orwell wrote about his place in the world as well as the vanishing world of childhood to create Coming Up For Air. Published in the spring of 1939, Orwell’s only first-person story contrasts humour and sentiment as its middle-aged protagonist, George Bowling, escapes the wife and kids for a trip to his boyhood village only to find the pastoral replaced with pavement.
Writer and director Leslie Mildiner originally adapted the novel into a play in 2007.
“Blatant lies are being twisted to be presented as the truth, and the truth is being presented as lies. That’s why it seems even more relevant now,” he says. “Believe it or not, that surprised me.”
The play offers a different version of Orwell. Instead of “rats in cages and bleak stuff,” the story follows a “downtrodden, middle-age insurance salesman who just can’t seem to get a break in life.”
Writing for The Guardian, Rob Hastings describes Orwell’s protagonists as: “Self-pitying . . . unattractive and all neurotically well aware of it.” But Bowling is blessed with an oblivious nature.
He tries to present himself as being above his station, Mildiner explains. “He keeps on saying, today I look a bit like a stockbroker. And he obviously doesn’t.” He also fashions himself as something of a ladies’ man, but he’s, “not a babe magnet by any means.”
Instead, Bowling is a modern version of Cassandra with psychic visions married by bad reception.
“Does anyone who isn’t dead from the neck up doubt that there’s a bad time coming?” Bowling asks.
“The character foresees a catastrophe coming, something terrible, probably a war, a slump, he’s not sure what,” Mildiner explains.
In a passage that could’ve been written five minutes ago, Bowling describes a “human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let’s all get together and have a good hate.”
It’s cutting social criticism, but it’s also highly relatable, Mildiner explains.
“Most people, unless they’re Donald Trump, have a sense that they don’t have tremendous power in the world,” he says.
In order to convey humour alongside desperation, Mildiner reached out to veteran character actor Bernard Cuffling to portray Bowling.
“He’s got a great everyman sense to him,” the director says.
It’s an essential quality as Bowling opines on development, pollution, and even fast food.
One of the most memorable moments of the book features Bowling chewing on frankfurters and realizing he’d: “bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of . . . rotten fish in a rubbery skin.”
Asked if the adaptation from page to stage was a quick one, Mildiner is quick to answer.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he says, explaining that the first version of the play was a tight four hours.
But after seven or eight revisions, he found the crux of the play.
“I concentrated on the core, emotional journey of this character,” he says.
The play is now a lean 90 minutes, with an intermission.
While it’s not for young children, teenagers and adults are all welcome to see Orwell, still alive and well.
