THE MARY ANN WHO BECAME GEORGE ELIOT
It’s 1842; Bird Grove is the handsome house near Coventry which Robert Evans bought in his retirement from managing a grand estate. With her brother Isaac married, the devout, churchgoing Evans believed that the respectability of their new household (rather than a humble estate cottage) would help to find a husband for his daughter Mary Ann, unglamorous but clever, self-educated by wide reading. Her bluestocking passion makes him even more uneasy because she has befriended the Brays, freethinkers; as we first meet them this daringly radical pair are here for tea, accompanied by Monsieur Lafontaine, a touring mesmerist who is at this moment waving his hands over both reclining women.
Isaac has introduced a friend, Garfield, who might, he hopes, marry Mary Ann. The idiot attempts a proposal , is firmly rebuffed , huffs about freethinkers and foreigners, and is thrown out by the gruff father. We seem to be in a fine social comedy, Austenian perhaps (Jonnie Broadbent’s scene-stealing absurdity is pure Mr Collins: marriage would be “the confluence of my economic and romantic aspirations”). Elizabeth Dulau is perfect in her serious simplicity and flashes of sharp brilliant intelligence, every response and line d line timed with quiet grace. Likewise Owen Teale’s kindly, fatherly grandeur , his solidity and honour apparent even before great emotion is asked of him.
And this comic opening is a brilliant way for Alexi Kaye Campbell to start his play about the young woman who later became George Eliot: cerebral and humane genius , rebel against rigid religiosity and women’s subjugation, author of Middlemarch. Because if ,like me, you had known only vaguely that she fell out with her father over churchgoing, and not read all the letters and memoirs that Kaye Campbell has carefully studied, you might dismiss Evans as another old patriarch. But Owen Teale’s decency and distaste for the clownish Garfield have won you over early; it is clear that coming battle of ideas with his daughter will be a real one, painful and gripping.
And so it is. He might have been fine with her unmarried, still turning up at church but bravely studying freethinkers and writing from a woman’s perspective to, “wrestle the pen from men’s hands”. But her steady, brave opinion is that while honouring the magnificence and beauty of Jesus’ message she would be a hypocrite to kneel and sing hymns and accept all Christian dogma. It is useful – in our times when very many churchgoers feel more or less that way and have no problem being there – to be reminded of earlier battles of feeling and belief. They were real.
The big confrontation is immense. and the better for the father’s unsettlingly topical cry about the need for religion: “if we do not pray together, agree on what it is that makes life meaningful and good and precious, then what will become of us? We will be like a thousand scattered leaves…a madhouse full of madmen and madwomen tearing one another apart”. Historically, that too makes you understand the power of the storms which raged a few years later, around Charles Darwin.
This thoughtful, moving treatment of the great 19c novelist is apt for Hampstead, for she lies not far away in Highgate cemetery: rejection of dogma and living unmarried with a man barred her from a place in Westminster Abbey, among the men of privilege whose hands had held the un-wrestled pen for cenuries. Anna Ledwich directs with measured pace a traditionally made play, chronological and conversational, no party tricks or timeshifts. The only 21c point of style is Sarah Beaton’s elegant creation of four lightly furnished rooms and a lobby on a revolve, characters freezing during scenes where they don’t speak. Its simplicities echo beautifully the spirit, restraint and honesty of ‘George Eliot’s own work: you feel you have lived through a novel in its two hour-long halves.
Every performance is finely judged, the Brays asTom Espiner and Rebecca Scroggs credible in their kindly, comfortable unbelief. Small details – like Teale’s throwing down his napkin at breakfast when his daughter has gently spoken her piece about church, but we know a wilder anger is looming – give the other side of the battle utter reality. Not everyone will get it, in an irreligious age, but I was with it every minute. May go again.
hampsteadtheatre.com. to 21 March
Rating 5
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