Hampstead Theatre, London – until 21st March 2026
Reviewed by Celia Armand Smith
3***
Alexi Kaye Campbell’s Bird Grove is a portrait of the young George Eliot. Before she writes Middlemarch and Silas Marner, George Eliot is the spirited Mary Ann Evans (Elizabeth Dulau) – bookish and full of radical thinking but not quite sure how it will fit with the life being laid out for her by her concerned brother and father. She no longer wants to attend church and she certainly won’t marry despite her brother Isaac’s (Jolyon Coy) best efforts to pair her off with a bumbling suitor (Johnnie Broadbent). With the help of her radical thinking friends The Brays, Mary Ann begins to defy the Victorian norms and traditions much to the heartache and disappointment of her father.
As her intellect and voice become stronger, the relationship between Mary Ann and her father Robert (Owen Teale) becomes strained. He is a self made man who has worked his way up to provide everything he can for his daughter including an education. Bird Grove takes its name from the large house the Evans family moved to in the Midlands in order to find Mary Ann a husband and it is where the play takes place. Sarah Beaton’s simple but effective rotating set has high panelled walls that line the back of the stage and a large window in the centre. A picture of elegant yet restrictive domesticity.Mary Ann’s companion/governess/maid Maria (Sarah Woodward) provides much of the humour, and her free-thinking friends the Brays (Rebecca Scroggs and Tom Espinar) are great in their roles as an alternative viewpoint to the stagnated world in which she has been raised.
Excellent performances from Owen Teale and Elizabeth Dulau lead a strong cast in Anna Ledwich’s intelligent and well acted production. However at 2 hours 40 mins, it is a bit long especially as the pace is slow in the first hour or so, but there is a message of hope at the end. Bird Grove is exactly the kind of period drama that would make great Sunday night TV so I hope that it makes the leap from stage to screen.