"Why Is Orwell Great?" London Is Staging a Theater Festival of His Work — and Here Are 7 of His Books

The festival is built on Down and Out in Paris and London.

According to The Guardian, Libby Brodie Productions has announced a partnership with the Orwell Foundation and UCL's Festival of Culture to stage ORWELL'S DOWN AND OUT LIVE this summer, a theater festival built around George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London — a tribute to a writer who understood homelessness and poverty as few have.

The festival runs two days, first in London and then in Paris. The London day is set for June 16, from 2 to 6 p.m., inside Senate House, the University of London's landmark building. It will be livestreamed, filmed by the director Edwin Mingard. The Paris day falls in September; nothing further has been announced.

In 1927 Orwell decided to become a writer and began to look closely at the lives of tramps. Two years later he fell badly ill, and a thief stole the last of his money. The hard stretch that followed produced Down and Out in Paris and London, first published in 1933 — the first book that Eric Arthur Blair, then 30, published under the name George Orwell. It examines poverty in the modern city in two parts: the first follows an English man of letters living hand to mouth on odd jobs in Paris, at the very bottom of the city; the second follows him from Paris back to London, where things get worse still and he ends up jobless, drifting from place to place.

The Guardian reports that ORWELL'S DOWN AND OUT LIVE is an immersive piece of theater and a series of events drawn from Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell's first essay, The Spike, and his novel A Clergyman's Daughter. Actors, artists, politicians, and campaigners will braid Orwell's writing together with the voices of today's homeless, so that audiences see and feel present-day poverty through theater, music, and literature.

The British Theatre Guide wrote: "Wandering from the streets of twentieth-century Paris to those of twenty-first-century London, ORWELL'S DOWN AND OUT LIVE uses humor, tragedy, and real soul-shattering sorrow to tell us that nothing, in fact, has changed — and that human beings can endure anything." The organizers hope the festival will speak to the worsening poverty and homelessness both countries face.

"Low incomes, insecure work, high housing costs, debt, and a lack of welfare are pushing people over the edge. Through theater made from Orwell's fiction, people can pay more attention to modern poverty, understand it better, and help solve it," said Campbell Robb, chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The foundation, an independent social organization working on poverty in Britain, is one of the festival's partners. At the end of 2017 it published a report on poverty in the UK that tracked the numbers over the previous 20 years — the first progress report on Britain's poverty-reduction efforts since the foundation launched its "Solve UK Poverty" program in 2016.

ORWELL'S DOWN AND OUT LIVE is not the only recent event of its kind. In November 2017, the BBC, Orwell's former employer, put up a statue of him outside its new headquarters. On the wall behind it is a line from Animal Farm: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

Robert Seatter, head of BBC History, said: "That line sets a high bar for the BBC. It pushes the BBC to live up to Orwell's standard of clear storytelling and truth-telling." In June 2017 the Orwell Foundation and Libby Brodie Productions staged 1984 LIVE, an immersive adaptation of Orwell's best-known novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Also in June 2017, a stage version of Nineteen Eighty-Four opened on Broadway, where audience members vomited, fainted, and screamed. In January 2017, after Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, used the phrase "alternative facts," Nineteen Eighty-Four shot to the top of Amazon's U.S. bestseller list within days and the publisher printed another 75,000 copies.

The reason for all this is simple. As Penguin put it on the 1979 paperback of Nineteen Eighty-Four: "First published in 1949, it is as relevant now as it was then."

The same goes for the man and his other books. The BBC reported that one of the main arguments for the bronze statue, after much deliberation, was that Orwell stands as journalism's finest example — all the more so in an age awash in fake news. And during the "alternative facts" episode, Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post said: "'Alternative facts' is a George Orwell phrase."

Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a bestseller again in many countries. The words Orwell made up in it — "newspeak," "doublethink," "big brother" — are in English dictionaries now, which says enough about his reach. His own name has become common currency too. "Orwellian" and "Orwellism" are everywhere.

"Orwellian" is the adjective, used for the terrors of totalitarianism and the rewriting of history; "Orwellism" is the noun, used for his left-wing admirers and his deliberate followers. "Few writers have ended up as both an adjective and a noun. Offhand I can think only of Marx, Freud, Darwin, Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce, and James," Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford, writes in his essay Orwell for Our Time.

In that essay Garton Ash takes up the question of why Orwell is great at some length. Much of it, he thinks, comes down to the strange pull of Orwell's life and work, and to how long they have mattered.

Orwell was English, with "a peculiar, obstinate, rebellious, thoroughly English character." No one, Garton Ash argues, has drawn the English character better than Orwell, "and he was himself a living anthology of Englishness" — his humor, his clumsiness with women, his love of the countryside, animals, and gardening were all English.

Garton Ash sketches the life in a few strokes: "The gifted scholarship boy from Eton who went on to be a colonial policeman in Burma, a dishwasher in Paris, a tramp in London; who kept a village shop, fought in the Spanish Civil War, walked away from London's left-wing literary world and settled on a farm in a remote corner of a Scottish island, dying of tuberculosis at the moment of his literary triumph, aged only 46. Tall and thin, in a shabby tweed jacket, loose corduroy trousers, and a black shirt, with an odd pencil-line moustache and a high, shrill voice, smoking working men's roll-ups — in his lifetime these were anecdotes; after his death they became legend."

As for why he matters: Orwell is beyond argument "the most influential political writer of the 20th century," a man who wanted to make "political writing into an art." The Orwell Prize, now Britain's most important award for political writing, exists to encourage "outstanding political writing" in the same spirit. "Long before Solzhenitsyn, and for far longer — from 1945 to 1990, the whole of the Cold War — what we then called 'the West' took Orwell as the supreme describer of totalitarianism in general and Soviet totalitarianism in particular," Garton Ash writes.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Orwell was the first person to use the phrase "cold war" in English. He was also a left-wing Cold War intellectual, an anti-communist socialist. Files declassified by the UK National Archives on September 4, 2007 show that Orwell was himself suspected of being a communist and was watched by MI5 and the Metropolitan Police's Special Branch from 1929 until his death in 1950. What matters more is that he was honest enough about his own writing — "to dare to be a Daniel, to dare to stand alone, to dare to have a purpose firm, to dare to make it known" — and held that "only a writer who belongs to no party can be honest."

According to the BBC, Orwell died of tuberculosis in January 1950 at University College Hospital in London. The "republic" he hoped to see rise from the rubble of the war never came; the "true socialism" he wrote about never even took shape. But two terms he coined in his newspaper columns, "cold war" and "the United States of Europe," turned out to be far-sighted. The Cold War ended; Europe's political and economic integration has moved back and forth, and now sits at a turning point because of Brexit. Many writers and columnists since have tried to imitate him and few have managed it, mainly because behind Orwell's sentences lies a whole set of strange and singular experiences that almost no one today can have, or wants to. His influence, meanwhile, has only grown.

"That is the great Orwell. We still need him, because Orwell's work will last," Garton Ash writes in Facts Are Subversive.

Finally, to help you get to know this writer better, we have picked out 7 books.

Novels: Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm

Orwell wrote only six novels (Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four). Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are beyond argument the most famous and the most important. As the much-quoted line has it: "Every extra person who reads Orwell is one more guarantee of freedom."

Non-fiction: Homage to Catalonia

Plenty of readers wonder how it happened. Orwell was thoroughly English and never went anywhere near Russia or Eastern Europe, so how did his novels get life under totalitarianism so exactly right? How did he understand it? How did he know? The answers are all in this book. It is also, arguably, his best piece of political writing.

Essays, polemics, and criticism: Inside the Whale and The Lion and the Unicorn

Beyond the novels and the non-fiction, Orwell's essays, polemics, and reviews are distinctive in their own right, crossing between politics and literature. In these two books he writes about Greene, Gandhi, Dickens, Kipling, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Zamyatin, and Mark Twain, and about nationalism, totalitarianism, socialism, and anti-Semitism, among much else. Note that Inside the Whale collects the literary criticism and The Lion and the Unicorn the social criticism.

Biography: Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation

This is the biography written by Jeffrey Meyers, a specialist in Orwell studies. The Atlantic called it admirable: "Jeffrey Meyers has drawn a portrait of Orwell that inspires admiration, yet he does not conceal the writer's decidedly unsaintly qualities... His is the most authoritative biography we have."

"Orwell had human weaknesses too. He wished he were rich, wished he were handsome, wished he never failed with women. Women always mattered to him... The Orwell in this book does not stand as tall as the legend. He was a man of high character who also had a violent streak and could do cruel things; he was tormented by guilt, punished himself to the point of masochism, and at times tended toward self-destruction," Meyers writes.

Related: Finding George Orwell in Burma

In the 1920s Orwell spent five years in Burma as a policeman of the British Empire. At the end of them he went back to Britain without warning, handed in his resignation, and started writing. Part of the reason he quit was that he could no longer stomach the arrogance, narrowness, and coldness of the British in Burma. Those years and those feelings are plain to see in Burmese Days, the novel he published in 1935. Burma kept turning up in his books afterward in one form or another: Burmese Days, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the unfinished A Smoking Room Story.

The American journalist Emma Larkin went back to the places where Orwell had lived and worked — Mandalay, Myaungmya, Rangoon, Moulmein, Katha. She was looking for answers: what was it that pushed Orwell out of colonial life and into writing? And what has made Burma so poor and so miserable? Larkin reconstructed a stretch of Orwell's life that nearly every scholar had passed over, wrote about the hold he still has on Burma, and drew the country as it is now, caught between the ghost of colonialism and the rule of the generals.

"There is a joke in Burma that Orwell wrote not one novel about the country but three: a trilogy made up of Burmese Days, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. An outsider like me can hardly see through the illusion the generals have built, or imagine the daily fear and insecurity of living in such a place. Trying to understand that side of Burmese life, I became fascinated by Orwell. All his novels ask how the individual is hemmed in by his surroundings, controlled by his family, by the society around him, and by an all-powerful government," Larkin writes.

Cover image: George Orwell, via BBC