Animal Farm by Creation Theatre can be seen at the Oxford Castle this summer and NICK UTECHIN talks to Ian Wooldridge about his own adaptation of Orwell's story for the stage

The Creation Theatre Company has been busy this summer: having already mounted three productions at various Oxford locales, along comes the fourth, and possibly most challenging. Previewing this week at Oxford Castle has been Animal Farm, which was successfully adapted for the stage some 25 years ago by theatre director Ian Wooldridge. And the six performers had better be on their mettle, for Wooldridge himself is here in Oxford, at the moment, overseeing a summer course organised by the British American Drama Academy, of which he is dean.

The George Orwell classic is the only piece of adaptation he has done in a career dedicated to the stage - he was artistic director of the TAG Theatre Company based at the Citizens in Glasgow before travelling east and taking the same post at the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company in Edinburgh in the mid-1980s.

Since 1993, he has been a freelance director - and one with a rather impressive address book: this week, his BADA students at Balliol College have received guest tuition from Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons.

"I quickly realised I couldn't include everything from Animal Farm," Wooldridge told me, "but it was vital to retain the book's set pieces: the revolution itself, the building of the windmill, Snowball's expulsion.

"They were always going to be the spectacular theatrical events, alongside the relationships between the animals, especially that between Boxer and Clover.

"I directed it four times myself - taking it into schools and the like - and the actors and I went to farms. We observed animals - we looked at horses and pigs - and we tried to catch the essence of Pig: what is that essence alongside the human? I also tried to capture the physicality, for example, of hooves versus trotters. And wings!"

The basic idea is that six actors gather in a space to tell the tale that Orwell himself described as a fairy story' and then slowly transform into the characters/animals.

The demographic of the audience, says Wooldridge, is absolutely extraordinary: "It should be delightful, it should be charming, but it's also very dark, ultimately a nightmare. But you can take it into a primary school, and you can show it to 70-year-olds."

The politics of the book - the targets that Orwell recalled and was aiming at in 1945 - ring true wherever there is authoritarianism, wherever there is tyranny. I mentioned a recent newspaper article which had mentioned Animal Farm as relevant to the Mugabe/Zimbabwe situation and Ian Wooldridge picked up on this immediately.

"When I first did it, we used to have after-show discussions with teenage audiences in secondary schools in Glasgow; and these students would know very little about the details of the Russian Revolution, but they would talk about Thatcher, Idi Amin . . . universal, no question. And then there's the snouts-in-the-trough mentality that's always with us, always has been and always will be - I'm thinking of the current stuff about MPs' expenses. I always think of the book as a warning."

I took him back to the time when he wrote the adaptation - "a lonely occupation: I'm gregarious and like to be in a room with actors working things out!" - and, perhaps naively, asked Wooldridge if the politics of the era had had anything to do with his choice of work to prepare for the stage.

"Mrs Thatcher was in her pomp, really, just before the Falklands War. The fact that this woman is going to get a state funeral, possibly, appals me. I mean, where are we at, if she is going to be honoured in that way? This is a woman, who sowed fear, and anguish, in society, who introduced the whole business of market forces . . . and look where it's got us."

In publicity for the show, its director, Joanna Read, until recently artistic director of Salisbury Playhouse, has talked of "the grandeur of the castle setting mirroring the strong radical nature of Orwell's piece".

To be absolutely accurate, the play is being performed on what is now called the Garden Stage: this is, of course, on the site of the former Oxford Prison exercise yard, and so there was another obvious question to put to Ian Wooldridge.

"Yes, having a prison, that is interesting. As they say, prisons only run well because the prisoners allow them to . . . which is maybe the same with farms. The animals actually rule the roost, in a sense."

So long as all the members of the audience are treated as equals.

For tickets call 01865 766266.