Marrakech 2025 Part Two

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by Dominic Cavendish,

Chief Theatre Critic of the Daily Telegraph

Food poisoning took me out of the Orwell Society tour. But closer to Orwell? It struck like a squall on a becalmed sea. One moment sunshine, frivolity, bonhomie. Then, a wooziness, then a malady, later a clarity. With its carousel of visitors, disgorged like baggage soon swept out of sight in a murmur of foreign accents and a shared grasping intent of breakfast consumption, the Wazo hotel squats near the site of Coming Up for Air’s creation. A ghost trail. Here was once tranquillity of sorts for Eric and Eileen – where now there is despoiled scrubland, the stench of commuter traffic, the amplified call to prayer and the kind of ribbon-road suburbia that Orwell summoned, in an anglicised fashion, in his pre-war portrait of a fugitive but snared Everyman.

Some moons ago, when I adapted the novel for the stage, the book itself was a kind of oasis, a place of certainty amid the barren, shifting dunes of journalism. The moral of the tale, not heeded, is never go back. It can’t be the same… And while I needed to go to Morocco for the first time, to get my bearings, the fact is that I was brought face to face with the kind of disappointments that are George Bowling’s salutary reckonings: an idea of fertility and sanctuary usurped by dereliction and pollution, picturesque detritus.

Everything seemed to come full circle so that the kind of nausea that seizes Bowling was my existential forfeit, too. The middle-aged anti-hero tries to escape the rat-race only to encounter harbingers of 1984’s rodent nightmare; he is impelled back to his domestic torture chamber. So, with me in joining the pilgrimage, seeking succour and perhaps – glancing at R Blair and Quentin K – a shared sublimated quest for fatherhood, however distanced. Contemplating my innards, and the interior of the bathroom, I gazed into the motives for my own participation. As I lay prone for several days in my room 101 cell, with kettle and TV, I felt a nagging sense of modest hope thwarted, folly exposed. At the risk of seeming delirious even now, though, that’s what the trip most valuably offered – the pang of unfulfillable yearning. The biographical material is fed in crumbs that lead a trail back to one’s own famishment. Orwell was here, once, but is now felt as an absence. And isn’t that what transfixes us about his writing? Despite the shining almost heroic example of his resolve to make sense of the world as he saw it, he can only accompany us so far, until we’re face to face with a renewed isolation. Gut-wrenching stuff, food for thought etc. It was worth every Dirham.

* PS: there were of course good times, from the Water Museum to the Auberge des Noyes, so … ignore me. Though, a tip: if you’re inclined to take a bite of a falafel pitta, be prepared to falafel.

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Read ‘Coming Up For Air revisited: Orwell, England and the Idea of Escape’ by Dominic Cavendish here.