Coming Up For Air

Coming Up For Air
There’s no doubting Orwell’s taste for despair. The looming inevitability of WW2 provides the backdrop for Coming Up For Air which sees George Bowling locked into his suburban existence, desperate to escape back to his childhood village. Inevitably though his old haunts have changed, the world has moved on and turned his favourite place into a rubbish dump.
The bitterness caused by the raping of this personal cherished past is vividly portrayed by Dominic Cavendish’s adaptation of Orwell’s book and Cruttenden’s performance brings across the anger, resentment and ultimately fear of what’s to come. Orwell’s pessimism of machine guns poking from English windows may have been proved wrong, but 70 years on his work still rings with a chilling resonance.
(The listing in the Fringe Programme is completely wrong, but it's on at the Assembly Rooms at 11.00am).