THEATRE

Theatre review: Mrs Orwell

The Sunday Times
By George: Cressida Bonas with Peter Hamilton Dyer
By George: Cressida Bonas with Peter Hamilton Dyer
SAMUEL TAYLOR

Based on true events, Tony Cox’s play examines the end of George Orwell’s life, in a London hospital in 1949. Racked with tuberculosis, Orwell is convinced he has three more books in him. He pins his survival on Sonia Brownell (Cressida Bonas), a head-turning, name-dropping literary assistant, and asks her if she makes dumplings, by way of an idiosyncratic marriage proposal. Peter Hamilton Dyer is strong as an acerbic Orwell, capturing with vim the author’s contradictory attitudes towards socialists, intellectuals and the latest fashion for scanty panties. Edmund Digby-Jones keeps the tone light as a creepy, manic-eyed Lucian Freud: he’s brought in to draw Orwell, but is mainly interested in trying it on with a bored-seeming Brownell. Not that Bonas is given a chance to