This is a play about George Eliot when she was known only as Mary Ann Evans, in her 20s and living in a respectable corner of Coventry in the 1840s with her father. Played by Elizabeth Dulau, she is not yet the formidably unconventional woman she would become.
Evans would later scandalise the genteel society that her upwardly mobile father, Robert (Owen Teale), was so desperate to please, not least so he could get a decent marriage secured for this clever, spirited daughter. Evans would go on to befriend free-thinkers, cohabit with a man and write some of the most celebrated and humane works of fiction in the English literary canon. Playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell shows the seeds of all those facets of her life here, in her family home of Bird Grove.
The focus is daughterly dissent and Evans’s ideological clash with her father. It comes in her announcement that she will no longer be accompanying him to church on Sundays due to her departure from conventional interpretations of the Bible. It leads to him banishing her from Bird Grove.
In Anna Ledwich’s production, there is humour bound up in the serious drama, largely in the earlier, slower scenes. There is a comical plotline around a marriage proposal: the ridiculous Horace Garfield (Jonnie Broadbent), who looks like a Dickensian caricature in his fancy neck tie and chequered jacket, needs to be wed in order to claim his inheritance and wants a marriage of expediency with Evans. Meanwhile, the scandalously free-thinking couple Charles Bray (Tom Espiner) and Cara Bray (Rebecca Scroggs), whom Evans has befriended, are sitting in the parlour along with French mesmerist Monsieur Lafontaine (James Staddon). It is amusing but these minor characters do not add all that much: the Brays are little more than facilitators to Mary’s ambitions to travel, write and be her own woman, while the mesmerist soon disappears.
The production is a kind of half-way house between a play of ideas and a father-daughter drama. There are conversations that spell out Evans’s growing feminist consciousness (“I suppose it’s for us to wrestle that pen from the men,” she says) and drawing-room discussions on Christianity that pitch opposing arguments. But among them are some searingly emotional family scenes, all the more powerful for their tender understatement, with well-tuned performances across the cast.
Some facts have been changed: Eliot was never thrown out of the house by her father, although he disapproved of her questioning of Christian dogma, and the inheritance plotline, which sees Mary as a lone daughter being left very little in comparison to her brothers, was not an act of revenge by him but convention – and a second sister faced the same lack of fortune. This does not undermine the story here but may grate for some Eliot enthusiasts. The inheritance issue is not quite freighted enough: Mary’s brother Isaac (Jolyon Coy) openly states he will look after her.
Still, the play has a delicate emotional power that takes hold slowly and has a lovely, strong, central performance from Dulau. It all takes place in the Evans’ Georgian household which is a pale blue wood-panelled space, designed by Sarah Beaton, on which several wall-less rooms (parlour, kitchen, study) revolve with each switching scene. It mixes drawing-room naturalism with something more interestingly abstract. The fictional character of Dorothea (Katie Eldred), from Eliot’s Middlemarch, makes a brief appearance to inspire her creator, which completes the unstable sense of reality mixed with dream. It is a moving moment which might have been cheesy. Mary is seeing her future in Dorothea, and grabs it with both hands.
At Hampstead theatre, London, until 21 March
