ANIMAL FARM

The Finger Players Drama Centre Theatre May 15

- Ong Sor Fern Arts Editor

The best thing about The Finger Players' adaptation of Animal Farm, English author George Orwell's classic 1945 novella, is Loo An Ni's astonishing puppets.

Each operated by a single puppeteer, the exo-skeletons with just masks and feet to identify the individual animal characters are a marvel of inventive construction. Especially impressive are the four-legged puppets, which usually would have taken at least two operators to manoeuvre around the stage.

The technical polish of this staging is not in doubt, with a clever onstage sequence of the farm's vaunted windmill being built by the animals. But this straightforward adaptation, commissioned for the Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa), also feels flat, with some character arcs getting short shrift with the need to condense the cast for a more manageable staging.

Some of this can be attributed to the source material. Orwell's story is a political allegory in which characters are representations of political positions rather than fully fleshed personalities.