To watch Alexi Kaye Campbell’s Bird Grove is to spend two hours contemplating how to make a literary genius. Part period piece, part dreamy biographical drama, the play performs an act of time travel, allowing Hampstead Theatre’s audience to take a peek at the life of George Eliot in the 1840s, when her writing successes lay ahead. Virginia Woolf once claimed there was nothing of interest in Eliot’s biography: she was ‘the grave lady in her low chair’, and her ‘private record was not more alluring than her public [one]’. But Campbell’s play impresses in its consideration of how such apparently ordinary domestic existences and family relationships forge great art.
When the play begins George Eliot is still plain Mary Ann Evans, a dutiful daughter with bookish tendencies who lives in quiet Coventry with her father, Robert, a retired estate manager. As far as literary achievement goes, she’s written a few articles and made painstaking translations but hasn’t yet penned her own novels. A more conventional existence appears laid out for her: marriage and financial security. This arrives at her door in the form of Horace Garfield, an absurd man who incessantly speaks of his digestion issues. He’s the (almost) heir to a fortune, providing that he can quickly secure a wife. That he is rejected by both father and daughter is hardly a surprise, but it brings into focus their differing opinions about who Mary Ann should be. Mary Ann’s father imagines her as a well-provided-for wife and mother. She imagines adventures, atheism, books and lovers.
The production is held together by a cast of well-limned early nineteenth-century characters. As Mary Ann, Elizabeth Dulau shines in conveying a spirited yet loving daughter whose apparent poise masks a soul on fire. Owen Teale plays Robert as a proud member of the new bourgeois who wants his daughter to achieve social elevation but maintains deep concern for her wellbeing. If the relationships in his family are strained, it is due to the pressures of social norms rather than any flaws in their natures.
The supporting actors add colour and vivacity. Jonnie Broadbent’s Horace Garfield oozes Dickensian grotesqueness. He dodders round the stage, unable to say the right thing and hopeless in his efforts to get Mary Ann alone. Tom Espiner and Rebecca Scroggs play Mr and Mrs Bray, a radical couple who encourage Mary Ann’s subversiveness but at times feel little more than mouthpieces for socio-political ideas. And as Mary Ann’s brother, Isaac, Jolyon Coy maintains an air of humility and openness while wielding tremendous power in determining the course of his sister’s future.
Nineteenth-century literary scholars and the author’s most dedicated fans might feel a little niggled at Campbell’s handling of history. In preparation for tackling his subject matter, the playwright knuckled down and read all the biographies of George Eliot. Regardless, he sacrifices social realities of the period for dramatic effect. Indeed, despite Mary Ann’s father’s disapproval of her religious scepticism, he did not order her to leave home, which would have compromised her social reputation. Likewise, the confrontations that occur between Mr Evans and Mary Ann, a result of his conservative ideas and her progressivism, would not have been vocalised so overtly.
That we are not meant to take the play too literally, however, is made clear through Sarah Beaton’s abstract set design. Characters drift spectrally between the wall-less rooms of the Georgian villa. The centre of the stage revolves to foreground scenes, as if certain memories are flashing back into a mind. Meanwhile, other parts of the villa are kept eerily suspended in shadows. This all lays the foundations for the play’s ending, in which Mary Ann’s literary creation, Dorothea, walks onto the stage and prophecies her future triumphs: ‘You will be published. And you will find your soulmate, too […] You will write seven novels, one of which many believe is the greatest of the nineteenth century.’
If Campbell’s play has issues, they lie in the dialogue, which needed to be edited in the first act. There were myriad lines about apple cake, odd moments of self-consciousness, and comedy that felt superfluous. Moreover, the feminist discourse used throughout, while sincerely felt, was generally unnuanced and jarringly modern. ‘As long as you only have one sort of person telling the stories, well then our world will just end up looking very like that one sort of person,’ explains Mary Ann’s confidante, Cara Bray. With a vast onstage library, it would have been better if Mary Ann had read extracts from books by her literary foremothers like Jane Austen (whom Eliot greatly admired). This would have shown an awareness that Mary Ann was not a sole voice; there was a tradition of female writing behind her.
Taken as a whole, Bird Grove is a welcome piece of new writing that spotlights the historical value of women’s domestic lives. It provides insight into Eliot’s biography at an important moment, revealing the relationships that shaped her character and made her yearn for a different way of existing in the world.
Period Drama
By Alexi Kaye Campbell
Director: Anna Ledwich
Photo credits: Johan Persson
Cast includes: Jonnie Broadbent, Elizabeth Dulau, Owen Teale, Sarah Woodward, Tom Espiner, Katie Eldred, Jolyon Coy.
Until: Saturday 21st March 2026
Running Time: 2 hours and 40 minutes, including an interval.
Review by Olivia Hurton
25th February 2026