A MIDLANDS MONUMENT
Never mind if you haven’t read this greatest of English novels. Or, like me, not re-read for decades: in order to find joyful recognition in this monumental RSC production you need only be human. I had actually forgotten some characters and moments, like poor gambling Fred’s horseflesh deals and shame at scrounging a loan while longing for patient plain Mary, who won’t give him up but needs him to reform. Nor had I quite remembered the wild streak of pre-Victorian melodrama running through the small workaday Midlands town’s travails: Bulstrode and blackmail, the dramatic will-reading. Nor, long ago and younger by far, had I ever really understood what a beautiful pattern of diverse selfishnesses it weaves: from noble impetuosity to status-anxiety, professional blindness, plain vanity and in some players, frankly what we would now call ADHD.
But of course at its heart is Nia Towle as the great- hearted ; ill-judging then slowly growing Dorothea , rushing into marriage with the dessicated scholar Casaubon ( Ian Drysdale beautifully enraging a cold dignity that turns to dark spite). In an artful parallel, Emma McDonald’s Rosamund captures the sober Dr Lydgate with a tear and half-ruins him with her needs: all these small personal stories these set against and within the background of politics with chuckeheaded Brooke, passionate Ladislaw, and the finally villainous Bulstrode. Who is layed by John Hodgkinson . Who – it took me the cast-list and a next-day daze to work out – doubles as the disgracefully, memorably, magnificently exuberant and insanely wigged Northrop Trumbull , the very Brummie auctioneer. Bravo.
The RSC at its best knows how to make dramatic art out of other forms, with careful simplicity weaving historical credibility, tangling here with 1832 politics, women’s growing role and vulnerability and the restless industrial revolution’s dawn,. It takes seriously the book’s morality, reflection of marriage’s glories and dangers, and serves it to us sometimes as gossipy as a soap and sometimes as funny as a sitcom, yet leaves you with a greater heart.
It’s a big commitment: two parts of the same story, , each play nearly three hours, a massive cast of 18. Jeremy Herrin, who brilliantly led us through Wolf Hall and Bring up the bodies, directs: Nina Raine has dramatized it and – by putting onstage Amanda Root as the author Mary Ann Evans – George Eliot – she artfully keeps some of the dryly brilliant narrative lines alive. Indeed a cherishable, memorable thing about these six glorious hours is Root’s performance as the novelist: gentle face, calm strength, quiet moral vigour, a vital presence. Sometimes she is wandering through, looking on with maternal exasperation at follies , briefly admonishing or comforting her characters, drily ironic as she observes that even a beast under a yoke has private feelings of its own . There is a quiet dramatic shock when she quietly counteracts our own exasperation: as when she is suddenly extraordinarily compassionate towards Casaubon’s “frigid rhetoric” of wooing and his stonewalling of his wife with “we will speak no more on this subject”. There is something startlingly 21c when she explains, maybe excuses, him for the inner emptiness and insecurity. Again, when Rosamund has defied and carelessly humiliated Lydgate, abruptly our authoress reminds us of the lost baby, her female helplessness.
This wise narrative device of onstage author achieves much: artistically it makes you reflect on the aesthetic of “God’s-Eye” narration in a novel, simultaneous creation and detachment, and how George Eliot’s achievement is so remarkable. On a more personal level ,my companion agreed, it just made us wish we had a wise author played by Root wandering through our own life’s scenes to make more sense of them and forgive us. .
Everything works. Intimate unfussy staging by Grace Smart suits this fast-moving, fascinating jigsaw of human folly and longing, bare stage under a hanging beamed ceiling with furniture as needed rising from the floor: tables, desks, chairs, a statue, two deathbeds. Sometimes a line of characters at the back becomes a group of onlookers., like us, as in any community. There is subtle brief music or chants, once a heartbreaking song from Rosamund. Understated costume details tell stories of their own: Dorothea lives in her grey-brown frock, flouncy sister Celia in blue, yet a single blue sash -perhaps borrowed from Celia – is seen tied around Dorothea during the brief moment when she really hopes for a fulfilling marriage with Casaubon.
Everything pours in meaning, every brief scene digs into deep feeling.
I cannot think of any more complete, satisfying theatre experience to mark , as it does, the last stage review on this site…
(more explanation of that in a day or so, but meanwhile get yourself to the Swan. It’s worth it. Try and see both close togehter. For me, the temptation to go back for another such day is extreme….
rsc.org.uk to 16 Jan
rating , five
