One Georgie Orwell: An Introduction

Peter Cordwell explains the background

to his groundbreaking show

One Georgie Orwell

*

BACK in 2010, as editor of Greenwich Time, the Labour council’s weekly newspaper, I thought up ‘Me and my borough’ as a half-page, space-filling feature on prominent local people.

I did the first one, interviewing Greenwich Theatre artistic director James Haddrell. It went very well but, typically, I went over the top towards the end. ‘I’ve got an idea for a George Orwell musical,’ I said. ‘I like Orwell. Have a go,’ said James, a great friend to this day.

I had no experience of theatre or music, but by the time I got to the DLR station I had the first line of the first song: ‘His name was Eric Blair, but the likeness stops right there.’

A month later I met an old acquaintance in Sainsbury’s car park at Lee Green and asked him, as I’d asked many others before him, if he knew a good musician, singer-songwriter for me to work with.

He did, his son, and Charlton fan and teacher Carl Picton proceeded to make it all happen. We knocked out eight songs in about eight months. He provided the music and found the cast, and in 2012 we enjoyed four nights at James’s theatre, followed in 2014 by a week at Teatro Latea in New York’s Lower East Side.

The idea was always that we’d use Orwell’s own words – why on earth why not? – and we got a good write-up by none other than the great Dione Venables, who sadly died in September.

One Georgie Orwell? I chose the football-style title because I thought we needed a working-class tribute to the great man. ‘Unashamedly proletarian,’ as James Haddrell put it in the ad.

In November 2014 the show went to New York: read about it here.