★★★
To go to church, or to not go to church? That was the question for Mary Ann Evans, the young woman who was yet to become George Eliot, writer of such formidable works in the English Canon as Middlemarch and The Mill on The Floss. Alexi Kaye Campbell’s new play reminds us, that men, woman and generation-defining authors like Evans, grappled with the constraints that they felt the church institution placed upon their minds during the Victorian period.
It’s a first time showing at Hampstead Theatre for playwright Campbell. Bird Grove is named after the house in Foleshill, Coventry, where Mary Ann Evans (Elizabeth Dulau) lived as a young 20-something during the 1840s. This biographical staging poses her struggling under the careful, worldly but tender eye of her estate agent father Robert (Owen Teale), who is equal parts wary and eager to find her a husband. A static and stripped period set that moves by a revolving turntable stands firm as seasons pass through visuals on the windowsill backstage.
Evans herself, inspired by the radical thinking of her socially outcast friends The Brays, holds her beliefs and independence against the expectations of conventional marriage, domestic life and intellectual restraint, placed upon her by the period. For an assumption of intellectual submission to men was sadly the hallmarks of her time for women. Sitting in our seats, we await the breaking point that will shatter most of her familial relations.
The script has plenty to sink your teeth into for any familiar with how George Eliot and the Victorians, expressed themselves through writing. Remarks of Mary Ann Evans to her “awakening conscience”, the beatings of her heart becoming confused by the network of thoughts inside her head and a declaration that “love is not a feeling but an intelligence” by Cara Bray (Rebecca Scroggs), pinned the language 19th century fiction nicely into place.
Despite a questionable ending, the play runs smoothly and satisfies passive viewers who enjoy a family tiff and active, avid Victorianists, alike. Dorothea (Katie Eldred), Eliot’s protagonist in her most famous 1000-page novel breaks a previously reliable narrative with a clumsy stage entrance involving an actor who, forming an existence for all of two minutes, runs off into the wings. A reliable script that makes an admirable attempt at historical accuracy supported by a world class show brochure breaks into confusion, treating its audience as children who have not already at least researched some of Eliot’s work.
Elizabeth Dulau is a delight, however. She brings a pulsating anger, frustration and quiet intelligence to Mary Ann Evans which though in moments repels attempts to constrain the character, also glides at others in eloquent speech as she wrestles with the limitations pressed upon her.
Owen Teale feels a little uneasy as the father of Evans. This is odd for a play that surely reminds him of playing Torvald Helmer in Ibsen’s A Doll House, another much less agreeable 19th century patriarch in a 1997 adaptation. Teale’s coarse, subdued characterisation, avoids much gesticulation and works better for the latent sadness that grows in this Victorian gentleman near death and not for the red-faced parent of a daughter who will not agree with what he dictates her to do.
For lovers of Victorian drama, where the decision to have tea or opinions upon what cake to consume can signal the undercurrent of emotions at play, Bird Grove is a must see. But for newbies who are getting to grips with the genre or didn’t have a previous love of George Eliot at heart, it is an ever so slightly too slow and static watch.
Bird Grove will be performed at Hampstead Theatre until 21 March.
Words by Harry Speirs
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