'Bird Grove' review — quietly scorching play about writer George Eliot

Read our review of Bird Grove, now in performances at the Hampstead Theatre to 21 March.

Summary

• Elizabeth Dulau stars as Mary Ann Evans - otherwise known as George Eliot - in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s play
• Bird Grove is Campbell's first play in nearly 10 years
• Owen Teale also stars as Robert Evans

One writer movingly honours another in Bird Grove, Alexi Kaye Campbell’s gripping slow burn of a play about Mary Ann Evans in the lead-up to her literary renown as George Eliot.

How did the author of Middlemarch come by her Victorian-era clout, not to mention a male name that continues to wrongfoot newcomers to her lustrous output – seven novels, almost all of which have themselves been adapted at various times? That is the subject of Campbell’s first play in nearly 10 years, which picks up its central character in her early 20s: the age at which she ought to be thinking of marriage.

That in itself sounds worthy of Jane Austen but Bird Grove instead turns out to be a quietly scorching play about the price paid by a restless spirit who refuses to be reined-in. The narrative ceases before Evans has actually adopted her legendary nom de plume. But playgoers by that point will surely be in thrall to the psychic journey that has led her to this decision, and to a star-making performance from Elizabeth Dulau, the young actress best-known up to now for her Emmy-nominated turn in TV’s Andor.

Impassioned and intense, Dulau gives herself over fully to this embryonic artist desperate to be heard – those very words conclude the first act – and as resistant to the shackles of religion as she is to marriage to the wrong man. That latter prospect consumes the play's start, which finds Mary Ann on the retreat from a buffoonish suitor, Horace Garfield (an, um, exuberant Jonnie Broadbent), from whom you might also recoil, given his apparent issues with diarrhoea.

This aborted relationship turns out to be a red herring of sorts, and the play finds its footing once it shifts focus to Mary Ann’s relationship to her 60-something father, Robert, who depends on the very daughter whom he goes on to leave out of his will. Making a welcome return to the stage following his Old Vic Scrooge in 2022, onetime Tony-winner Owen Teale (A Doll's House) is terrific as a man for whom everything is a negotiation. “I shall consider the way in which I love you,” he tells his tearaway daughter. That remark will have repercussions later on, even as it makes one wonder what this difficult man's rapport was with his other four children, only one of whom - Jolyon Coy's rather wet Isaac - gets a look-in here.

The narrative unfolds on a beautiful high-ceilinged set from Sarah Beaton containing streamlined bookshelves that at one point find Mary Ann sending one volume after another – all of course written by men - crashing angrily to the floor. (The title refers to the capacious family home on the periphery of Coventry, the locale itself used for a quip or two.) Questioning and questing throughout, a woman who once thought of a career in geology is seen asserting herself amidst a literary canon with which she must make an uneasy peace.

Both the play, and Anna Ledwich’s empathic production, gather strength as they go on. Early bursts of the portentous – “I know what I need to do,” Mary Ann tells us – give way to Campbell’s portrait of an artist as a young woman seen fighting the ravages of familial legacy and the law. That often occurs in the company of her ally and friend, Maria (a lovely turn from Sarah Woodward).

Why might all this matter to audiences now? A throwaway line reminds us of the importance of listening amidst a landscape that increasingly disavows it. And lest Campbell seem to be going down the path of heritage theatre, the play feels entirely modern in its insistence on the kind of self-reckoning that people talk about these days when they reference “being seen”. The material wouldn't land as well as it does, however, without the energy and drive of Dulau, whom we find at the end in the company of Eliot’s greatest creation, Dorothea from Middlemarch, who is brought fleetingly to life by a deliberately wispy Katie Eldred.

“I was born in this house,” Dorothea tells her bemused creator, to whom we bid farewell just as Mary Ann Evans's new life as George Eliot is about to begin: A sequel, anyone?

Bird Grove is at the Hampstead Theatre to 21 March. Book Bird Grove tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Elizabeth Dulau in Bird Grove (Photos by Johan Persson)