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Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, was a formidable and visionary writer at the heart of progressive intellectual circles in the nineteenth century. Bird Grove, the house her father purchased and where she lived with him before becoming the figure we recognise today, stands as a potent symbol of the social expectations he harboured for his daughter. Within its walls, she begins her measured, thoughtful rebellion against these constraints. In his play, Alexi Kaye Campbell offers a compelling portrait of a writer forging her identity. As her friend Mrs Bray anachronistically observes, she is finding her own voice. That spirit is captured by Campbell with striking sensitivity; Eliot is at once rational, principled and deeply compassionate. Bird Grove is a refreshingly intelligent play about emotionally intricate characters who must confront profound differences in their attitudes and beliefs, yet strive to do so with dignity and mutual regard. It feels worlds away from so many contemporary debates, which are often disfigured by ignorance, intransigence and insensitivity. Campbell notably honours Eliot’s legacy in both the tone and theme of his work, although the play does falter briefly with Eliot’s shouted assertion at the end of Act I. It is a moment which jars against the otherwise measured texture of the drama, just as the appearance of Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch at the close of Act II feels similarly superfluous, an unnecessary reminder of Eliot’s later renown that the play scarcely needs. Aside from such slight misjudgements, however, the production is a resounding triumph. Sarah Beaton’s set design is simple and evocative, while the cast is consistently impressive. Owen Teale brings gravitas and emotional depth to Robert Evans, while Elizabeth Dulau gives Mary Ann a luminous intensity. Rebecca Scroggs delivers a nicely calibrated performance as the radical Mrs Bray and Sarah Woodward never falls into parody as the devout Maria Lewis. The two nicely embody the ideological poles between which Mary Ann must navigate. Crucially, the writer-to-be stands poised between these two distinct ways of moving through the world. On one side lies the exhilarating but precarious route of intellectual independence, moral inquiry and personal authorship while on the other stands the inherited path of dutiful obedience, piety and submission to paternal authority. She thoughtfully opts for neither path. Instead, she occupies the charged, uncertain space between them, absorbing, testing and reshaping each influence. The drama derives much of its vitality from watching her establish a third way, one that reconciles feeling with reason and conviction with compassion. In the end, however, the play is not simply a portrait of a great novelist taking shape. It is a searching meditation on how a young woman claims the authority to think, to speak and to live on her own terms. Despite a couple of overly emphatic moments, the production succeeds magnificently in illuminating the courage, intelligence and moral seriousness that would come to define George Eliot. It leaves us with a vivid sense of a mind awakening and of a life being deliberately, bravely composed.
Rated: ★★★★★
Reviewed by J.C.
Photo by Johan Persson
When, Where, Getting there:
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