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Marriage of convenience? Peter Hamilton Dyer as George Orwell and Cressida Bonas as Sonia Brownell in Mrs Orwell.
Marriage of convenience? Peter Hamilton Dyer as George Orwell and Cressida Bonas as Sonia Brownell in Mrs Orwell. Photograph: James Gourley/Rex/Shutterstock
Marriage of convenience? Peter Hamilton Dyer as George Orwell and Cressida Bonas as Sonia Brownell in Mrs Orwell. Photograph: James Gourley/Rex/Shutterstock

Mrs Orwell review – Cressida Bonas is persuasive as Orwell's muse and mistress

This article is more than 6 years old

Old Red Lion theatre, London
This powerfully acted story of George Orwell’s death-bed marriage to Sonia Brownell makes for an entertaining night of literary intrigue and anecdote

George Orwell, while dying of tuberculosis in hospital, is being painted by Lucian Freud, who tells a story about going dancing with Princess Margaret.

This moment in Tony Cox’s play captures the attraction of biographical drama (the promise of historical gossip) and the genre’s disabling risk of becoming a succession of name-drops, with exposition and character provided by history rather than the playwright.

Cox avoids the latter trap in Mrs Orwell by focusing on a relatively undocumented story about the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The titular wife, Sonia Brownell, was a publishing assistant who had baby-sat Orwell’s son. In 1949, with some of the last breath in his lungs, the author proposed, seeking a nurse, literary executor and stepmother.

The script gives Orwell a joke most associated with the novelist Iain Banks, who when he was mortally ill tweeted that he had asked his girlfriend to do him the honour of becoming his widow. However, Banks was solemnising a loving relationship; Orwell and Brownell, at the start of their 14-week marriage, were not involved with each other, while she was close to both Freud and a French philosopher.

Bonas with Edmund Digby-Jones as a devilish Lucian Freud in Mrs Orwell. Photograph: James Gourley/Rex/Shutterstock

Brownell was the subject of a vivid biography by Hilary Spurling, who knew her. The play shares some of the book’s best details, such as Orwell’s culinary pre-nup that his bride must be “able to cook dumplings”, although, perhaps surprisingly, makes nothing of Brownell apparently having been the model for the beautiful, hard-working Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Cressida Bonas as Sonia persuasively portrays a woman pursued for her beauty but admirable for her mind and spirit, not flinching from suggestions that the doomed wedding included an element of financial calculation by the bride. Peter Hamilton Dyer captures Orwell’s contradictory mix of radical and reactionary attitudes, encapsulating his privileged background and military service in the brusque “yup” with which the writer concedes agreement to news or views. Lucian Freud, who believed in the unflinching depiction of human nature, is given a taste of his own artistic medicine in Edmund Digby-Jones’ portrayal of a selfish, devilish artistic and sexual predator.

Orwell’s will instructed Sonia to prevent biographies of him, and therefore would presumably have disapproved of a memoir-drama as well, but Mrs Orwell is an entertaining and powerfully acted literary anecdote.

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