Review: BIRD GROVE, Hampstead Theatre

George Eliot’s Middlemarch was, and is, radical for its acknowledgement of how society places limits on even the most ambitious and idealistic of its inhabitants. In his new play, Alexi Kaye Campbell explores how that notion of compromise may have affected Eliot herself, both to her own benefit and to her detriment.

Bird Grove, named after the Warwickshire house to which Eliot moved with her family after the death of her mother, zeroes in on her life before writing, when she was still known as Mary Ann Evans: her unusual level of education for a woman of her social standing, her friendship with the politically radical Bray family and her reluctance to marry.

At the heart of the play, though, is the relationship between Mary Ann and her father (a brusque, wisecracking Owen Teale). Mr Evans is gruffly encouraging towards Mary Ann but also constrained by the economic reality of having an unmarried daughter in Victorian England; Elizabeth Dulau as Mary Ann gives a fine, understated performance as a young woman balancing love for her father with resistance to his most strongly held beliefs, particularly about religion.

But this complex interplay between father and daughter, where both come out as mostly sympathetic, is rather spoiled by the actual details of Mary Ann’s life following her father’s death: the settlement of his will, explained in a meandering legal scene that could have been cut by half, casts him more unambiguously in the role of patriarchal villain. The wider conversation about the cost of resisting conservatism is flattened by the perfunctory fact that, like so many other women of her generation, George Eliot’s independent life did simply begin after the death of her father.

Elsewhere, Sarah Woodward as the family maid and Rebecca Scroggs as Mrs Bray provide interesting contrasting pillars in Mary Ann’s feminist awakening, but more often than not this gets lost in the weeds of Campbell trying too self-consciously to write a quote-unquote period drama.

Too often, oafish suitors, awkward dinners and hackneyed cries of “I want to read!” overwhelm the tender portrait of a complex domestic life that we see glimpses of throughout. Most depressingly of all, we have to be told constantly of Mary Ann’s intellectual capacity, because the play she’s in is too overwritten to give her the chance to show some of that intellect herself.

There’s some evidence of this missed opportunity in Sarah Beaton’s set design, too. Some images of domesticity, its pleasures and its capacities for destruction, are nicely evoked, but though the set is warmly lit and sparsely furnished, it still manages to feel restrictive. Instead of playing with the vast expanse available to them, Beaton and director Anna Ledwich spend much of the play dutifully lining up their characters in stuffy drawing room set pieces.

Choosing this relatively uneventful period of Eliot’s life for theatrical adaptation was a curious one. Perhaps the beginnings of her writing career in London and her long-running ménage à trois may have made for a more naturally exciting, intellectually stimulating play that would not need to fall back on tired humour to justify itself – then again, that play might also lack what Bird Grove has at its best, a quiet sense of a life on the brink of radical change.

Bird Grove plays at the Hampstead Theatre until 21 March