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This intriguing but rather dry new play from Tony Cox details the relationship between George Orwell and his second wife Sonia Brownell, who he married shortly before dying of TB at the age of 46.
Cox implies that the 30-year-old Brownell’s decision to marry the literary giant was monetary rather than romantic. Her subsequent entanglement with artist Lucian Freud (Edmund Digby Jones) – conducted on her husband’s hospital bed – and pining for a French lover further endorse the theory. Certainly the marriage, the cause of much media speculation at the time, was no ordinary attachment, and the motivations on either side are never wholly convincing.
As a result Cressida Bonas, herself no stranger to the media spotlight for a high profile relationship, struggles to find consistency in the central role. Our sympathies are constantly thwarted, such as when Bromwell appears to accept Orwell's proposal only after learning of his royalty figures. But she does capture a sense of Sonia’s spry intelligence; she was a literary editor who would become her husband’s greatest defender in later life. Her heated exchanges with publisher Fred Warburg (Robert Stocks) give some indication of what was to come.
Sympathetically directed by Jimmy Walters, the play does provide an intriguing portrait of Orwell himself. Peter Hamilton Dyer skilfully conjures the author’s eccentric brilliance, arguing with publishers one minute and slurping tea from a saucer the next. Convinced he has three more novels in him, the man behind 'Animal Farm' and '1984' rages against the dying of the light. He is rictus with anguish throughout, his hospital room a suitably Orwellian prison.
This pain and sense of literary loss provide the real heart of the drama, as we witness the premature end of a brilliant mind. But the central relationship of Mr and Mrs Orwell ultimately proves a red herring.