LGBT Christmas theatre calendar

I've been wondering about putting all the LGBT theatre listings I come across in one place for a while now. It's partly as a handy resource, and partly because it feels important to get a sense of how these stories are being put on stage, and by who, and how often. It always feels like a bit of a paradox that so many LGBT people work in theatre, but aren't always represented by what goes on on stage. That said, 2013's been pretty good so far, with brilliant, sensitive representations in The Events, The Pride, The Color Purple, Zhe: Noun Undefined, and Passing By, among others.

 At the tail end of the year, things are getting louder, brasher and ruder. Most of the shows I spotted for December are pantos, and South West London's a particular hotspot for the Fringier end of things. Jack Off The Beanstalk, in new gay venue The Stag in Vauxhall, promises filthy fun and scratch 'n' sniff cards for the audience. Just down the road, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern's Little Orphaned Fannie looks similarly likely to put the pant back in panto, as well as being a great place for a drink and some cabaret all year round. Clapham's Two Brewers is home to another pub pantomime, The Bitches of Oz, although the only info I can find about it is an enigmatic series of photos including some ruby slippers and a sign that says 'Keep Calm And Wish You Were Home' -- gosh, I wonder what the Drama Queens Drag Theatre Company are planning...

 If you want something a bit sweeter, Tom Wells' Jumpers for Goalposts at the Bush Theatre will give you toothache in the nicest possible way. It's a tender look at a Hull five-a-side gay football team with an appropriately skewed ratio of jokes to sportstalk for this soccer sceptic. Unlike anything else so far, you could even risk taking your parents... Camp (on the Estate) advertises itself as "suitable for mums and snowball drinkers", so looks to be similarly family friendly. It's a spectacular-sounding variety showcase (Bryony Kimmings, Scottee, Jonny Woo and more) that's drawing attention to a North London council estate that's made the crucial mistake of inhabiting the path of unlovable transport scheme HS2.

 I don't pretend to know anything about comedy, but Bah Humbuggers (Dyke the Halls) caught my eye in Time Out, and is a token attempt to correct the gender imbalance in this month's calendar. It's a curmudgeonly, unChristmassy night of words and music with VG Lee and Rose Collis. And if you fancy reminiscing about the golden days of lesbian and gay theatre (before the much-missed Drill Hall closed down) Alternative Pantos Revisited is fascinating looking talk on at Ovalhouse, as part of their exhibition celebrating the history of alternative theatre.

NB: I'm pretty sure these listings are not even close to exhaustive, as my criteria/searching methods aren't terribly scientific. If you think something should be on here but isn't, or spot a mistake, let me know.

Review Roundup

My favourites from the last month...

Jumpers for Goalposts, Bush Theatre http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/jumpers-for-goalposts/

Heartache. Heartbreak (Byrony Kimmings' new show) http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/heartache-heartbreak/

And I also saw, and enjoyed...

Emil & The Detectives, National Theatre http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/emil-and-the-detectives/ and an interview with the director, Bijan Sheibani http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/directing-the-detectives/

The Anatomy of Melancholy, Ovalhouse http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/the-anatomy-of-melancholy/

Lizzie Siddal, Arcola Theatre http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/lizzie-siddal/

Zhe: Noun Undefined http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/zhe-noun-undefined/

Passing By, Tristan Bates http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/passing-by/

Our Glass House

Originally published on Exeunt, 18th November 2013 at http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/our-glass-house-3/

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Fearful things.

The set of Common Wealth’s touring show dwells in home comforts –  a quiet residential redbrick, a crackling fire, pictures annotated with whimsical pencil captions, a child intently drawing. The text disrupts them, sets them alight, rewrites what seems harmless and sketches a dark shape over the mundane. Constructed from verbatim narratives, this is immersive performance on an intimate but brutal scale.

The stories it tells are a deliberate, but not a contrived, cross-section of people affected by domestic violence. It isn’t just the stereotype of working class married women, but young girls, men, the elderly, people of all backgrounds who are affected, each character telling a story in a room that becomes their whole world, full of minutely telling details that fill in the gaps between their words. The audience is encouraged to move around, but it’s hard to guiltlessly leave some of the scenes. An old woman, falling down repeatedly as though hit, feels desperately real and vulnerable. A pregnant woman, in the next room but worlds away, screams at herself for losing the back door keys so she can’t get her husband’s shirts  dry. A man in his 30s needs to make sense of his abuse by his delicate-seeming wife.

The aim of the piece isn’t to be cathartic, or celebratory. In a cross-legged post show discussion session, director Evie Manning explained that it’s aimed at raising consciousness and awareness. In its Edinburgh run, police came in, as part of their shift towards viewing domestic violence as murder prevention. Still, details like the marker pen-scrawled statistics that scar the house’s doors slightly tilt the balance towards the didactic – the estimate that one in four women will experience domestic violence points to the fact that not every audience member will be an impartial visitor. Aisha Zia’s text perfectly draws out and combines domestic violence’s internal, rather than external effects – it demonstrates that the mental marks abuse leaves that are seen and felt even when, as here, the abuser isn’t present. But entering into the universal trauma of abuse is an experience goes beyond the educational, into the emotional; the show’s more nakedly theatrical elements – a glittering shawl, draped and unwound, a painted wolf walking up the stairs – feel out of place in a script that reaches so far into less dressed-up truths.Others are hard to enter into. The sense of darkness just out of view, of fearful things hidden not just in cupboards, but barricaded in bathrooms or hedged into bedrooms, is brilliantly judged – instead of a Punchdrunk stampede following the sound of an incident in the next room, it feels safer to hesitate, to stay where things are safe.  Where the early, more exploratory stages of the piece are accompanied by live sound artists, making each room its own world, when silence falls, the actors’ voices join together and interlock as the individual spaces blur and combine into own shared threads. The house’s thin walls allow it to act as a single soundscape, allowing for moments of synchronicity – the characters pronounce a  mantra of their sufferings like one voice, and the everyday cacophony of pots and pans mixes with typewriters and casino chips to make an ear-splitting tattoo of pent-up anger. Still more effective is the dinner scene, where the actors converge for a meal, each walking on isolated tightropes above their own individual hells. Everything has to be just right, perfect, and forgetting the onions is enough to tip them into an internalised cycle of tortuous self-chastisement and abasement.

This is a show that raises consciousness, both in the sense of  informing, and in the sense of stirring up experiences, fears or shared confidences that tend to want to sink a bit deeper into memory. Still, its acute sensitivity to context and the needs of its audience enables it to strike a balance between the two, finding a delicate beauty and honesty in a painful faultline through all layers of society.

Katie Hims interview, and Billy the Girl review

Here's a review of Katie Hims's new play Billy the Girl, which is on at the Soho until the 24th November, followed by an interview I did with her in the run up to the show's opening. She was particularly interesting to talk to about gender and playwrights, although I'm not sure I share (or maybe don't want to share) her feeling that it's inevitable that "men write men" and women women.

Originally published on Exeunt, 5th November 2013 at http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/billy-the-girl/

Is positive thinking ever more than a handful of snappy catchphrases, and is helping yourself to more fruit and vegetables enough to mend a broken family? The understated message of Katie Hims’ new three-hander for Clean Break would make Samuel Smiles weep, as she wryly depicts title character Billy, recently released from prison, trying to climb up on treacherously flimsy self-help lessons to reach the family life she desperately wants.

When Billy shows up at the family home after a year behind bars, her mum Ingrid doesn’t exactly lay out the welcome mat – instead, she refuses to let Billy through the door, and relegates her to a caravan in the garden, a broken down memorial to holidays past. Each has their territory, and only Billy’s younger sister Amber acts as a go-between, living indoors but using the caravan as an outlet for her not so angelic side. Lucy Morrison’s direction is understated and natural – the family bicker darkly in pairs, scuffing their shoes on dirt, huddled or leaning like teenagers, their performances shining out.

Although Hims ran workshops in women’s prisons with Clean Break, this play doesn’t have much to say about life inside. Billy’s experiences of prison itself are mostly absent from the play; when Billy tries to talk about them, her mother stops her verbal ‘torture’, and only expresses a vague, pounced-on conviction that prison shouldn’t be fun.Naomie Ackie’s schoolgirl Amber is a brilliantly believable creation, terrified by her fear of conflict into projecting a relentless, shy sunniness. Christine Entwisle as Ingrid is a little more two-dimensional, her part written in broad comic harridan strokes that make her emotional struggles with Danusia Samal’s Billy unfairly loaded in her daughter’s favour. Danusia’s naive, sometimes edgy optimism is stunningly likeable, even on its very occasional descents into the twee, and her need for love is obvious and painfully raw.

But this play still feels sharp and current thanks to its consistently witty skewering of life-and-style supplement clichés – big weddings or marathons are just the thing to sort your life out – and affectionately observed detail, emphasised in Joanna Scotcher’s faithful design – shoplifted Alien vs PredatorDVDs, a lino strung up as a makeshift shelter for cardboard boxes of stuff, and Billy’s mother’s silky dressing gown, worn with defiant pride and accessorised by an e-cigarette. This frame round the mother and sister that Billy returns to houses a crystal clear, but distorting mirror image of her past, softening the family’s more brutal edges without ever fully concealing them.

At heart, this is a play about families, and especially about family secrets – about deliberately obscured, then half-forgotten truths hinted at by rediscovered photos or memories. It’s too subtle for a neat resolution, or unadulterated message, but still satisfies as a tender, torn-up portrait of a family group that can’t be mended by good intentions alone.

Originally published on Exeunt, 4th November 2013 at http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/a-girl-called-billy/

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“I got a kind of writer’s version of stage fright,” explains Katie Hims, whose new play Billy the Girl for Clean Break – a theatre company which does work with female prisoners and tells the stories of women and the criminal justice system – has spent a few years (metaphorically) trembling in the wings.

She’s best known for her work writing plays for BBC Radio 4 for over fifteen years, including being writer in residence in 2002, and most recently working on a fascinating sounding series of plays called Listening to the Dead, about communicating with the deceased through seances and mediumship. Still, although her work has recieved plenty of respect and acclaim, she still finds that “there’s quite a cocoon-like quality to writing in radio. If you don’t tell anyone it’s on it kind of gets missed, you’re under the radar.” Theatre, prickling with critics, is a more nerve-wracking prospect – “the potential for highs and lows is much more extreme, you need so many different things to fall into place. And whereas film and radio scripts get shelved and forgotten about all over the place, plays are this unstoppable machine after a point – if it’s happening, it’s happening.”

Hims’ writing process unfolded over a couple of years, and involved “I don’t know how many drafts – I don’t feel like I’ve written one play, I’ve done more like the material for three plays!” Billy the Girl was commissioned and produced by Clean Break. Accordingly, while developing the script, she ran workshops in women’s prisons, with a focus on “teaching and inspiring women, not going in to get material, but still, one of the most inspiring ways to get a story is to get a line of dialogue from something someone’s said.” Still, her work has given her a keen awareness of the two audiences she’s writing for – one at the Soho Theatre, where the play will be performed, and one at the prisons she’s worked in. “What mattered to me is that I reflected how funny and witty the women I met could be, and that I made something that made them laugh when they were watching it in prison.”

The strand she’s pulled from the masses of material she wrote is the story of Billy, a woman who’s living in the family caravan, trying to find a reconciliation with her mother and sister after being released from prison. “I like that it’s about somebody who’s consciously trying to change their trajectory. She’s got these quite simplistic, naive ideas about the power of positive thinking and eating healthily, but it’s all a bit half-baked, a bit like someone’s New Year’s resolution – you root for them even though you know there’s no way they’re going to go to the gym four times a week.” The gap between her aspirations and reality is the source for gentle humour, as is her family life, but as Hims elaborates, “I intended to write a comedy but it sadder than I intended. Still, I hope it’s a really optimistic resolution – particularly as it’s a play that plays prisons, I didn’t want to leave people in a sad or downbeat place.”

Hims is known for taking especial care with the way her radio plays sound, writing in lots of audio effects, and creating different acoustics for the environments of different scenes. I wondered how interested she was in the possibilities of physical environments, and what the visual world of Billy the Girl would look like. She explained that designer Joanna Scotcher’s set is “extraordinary, but I don’t want to talk too much about it and spoil the surprise of seeing it” – although it will be based around the caravan to which Billy is confined, and feature a bear costume. More than the visual, though, she’s been inspired by the way you can “feel the drama is there before anyone speaks, purely because it’s live.” She has a real enthusiasm for the theatre as a medium – “I’m obsessed with it, it’s amazing that so much blood, sweat and tears goes into one piece of work.” Still, when talking about her favourite plays and playwrights – an eclectic mix including Jez Butterworth (“although that feels like saying you fancy the prettiest girl in the class, because everyone loves Jerusalem”) Caryl Churchill, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Pinter and Beckett – she’s concerned about how many of them are “dead men,” who don’t write many women, or even, in Mamet’s case, “can’t write women for toffee!” “Female characters are always entirely central to my work, I can’t help myself because often I’m writing from tiny bits of my own experience, so I think it’s forgivable – men write men naturally, as at the heart of what your writing is your own experience. ”

At the heart of Billy the Girl is a family group of women – a mother and two daughters – whose story has been carefully crafted and researched in Katie Hims’ search for an authentic experience. Over the play’s rehearsal period, she’s found that “hearing it read it through and reworking it with the actors is one of the best ways of rewriting it,” in a process that unfolds more gradually than a two day radio studio recording. Although it’s been slow and sometimes difficult, working on the play has been “like stretching muscles that haven’t been used for a while – it would be nice to put what I’ve learnt into practice” in writing more work for the theatre. Hims is unfailingly modest, attributing her surviving theatre’s “fear factor” to the help of director Lucy Morrison, and the ability to work closely with her cast – a creative network that’s supported her in moving from “under the radar,” diffuse radio into the close personal connections of theatre.

Billy The Girl is at Soho Theatre from 29th October to 24th November 2013. 

Interview with Tim Rice

A few months back, I had a nerve-wracking but enjoyable phone interview with Tim Rice, perched in a park on my lunchbreak. It's in the latest edition of Auditorium magazine, out now, alongside some brilliant illustrations by Oat Montien.

It was a slightly strange disjunct, going from hearing about his new show From Here to Eternity, going in to rehearsals, and speaking to Tim Rice, to sitting in a production that felt rather more traditional than I'd imagined. It feels like the show has a mild identity crisis. The tube adverts are all bright pink lei-draped, ukulele-toting kitschery, but everyone involved is so keen to emphasise that it's a grown-up show for grown-up people. It definitely made for some odd moments on stage, as James Jones' darker moments are faithfully set in incongruous surroundings -- homophobic violence to an oddly jolly soundtrack, highlighted with trombones and zylophone, and a hysterectomy reference mingling with stockinged song and dance numbers. The Stewart Pringle's (brilliantly funny) review is here http://cormonkeys.wordpress.com/ -- mine will be out later this month, and will be a bit more generous, owing partly to my higher tolerance for musical theatre campery.

Three Shakespeare plays

For the October issue of Auditorium - out now! - I braved the West End for two attacks on Shakespeare. In retrospect, I was probably slightly harsh on one, and generous with the other, but although they both lacked a particularly dazzling interpretation, in terms of the quality and polish of the experience they provided, they were worlds apart. Neither of them rivalled Kenneth Branagh's Macbeth in Manchester, though, which was so memorable that even months later it feels more recent - a dusty trudge through industrial wastelands followed by an intense and bloody spell.

Originally published in Auditorium magazine, October 2013.

Wot? No Fish!!

I felt affectionately towards this show from the moment I got handed its flyer at Edinburgh, collaged with delicate pen and ink drawings, not splash quotes. I only felt more fond after a first encounter with Summerhall, an antiseptic breath of fresh air after the beer-soaked soggy postered crush of the big main venues – it felt un-theatrey, part of a more fluid kind of Fringe. Danny Braverman is following his residence in Summerhall’s lecture theatre with shows at festivals and community centres, in the parts of North and East London that saturate his family’s story, and his own carefully crafted performance.

Shows coming up:  Jewish Community Centre, Finchley Road, October 26^th at 7.30pm, 27^th at 4.30pm.

Originally published on exeuntmagazine.com, August 2013, at http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/wot-no-fish/

Sketches of the past. Photo: Malwina Comoloveo.

A battered old shoebox full of, not secrets exactly, but definitely a more private kind of treasure, is the fragile source matter for this delicately judged piece, half lecture, half performance. Danny Braverman’s great-uncle Ab drew cartoons on every wage packet he handed over to his wife Celie, decorating her housekeeping allowance as an act of love, penance for his failings, and for the sheer, evident joy he found in art. His great-nephew tells the couple’s story, as well as tracing his own path to and through this treasure; with archive-gloved hands, he sorts the mounds of envelopes into loose narrative lines, sketched over a period of sixty years.

The drawings themselves are full of character, and lose none of their strength in their amplification from three-inch high relics to bright, screen-filling projected icons. At one point, Danny describes them as outsider art, but although Ab was untrained, there’s nothing naive or fantastical about his style; his drawings start with a classic 1920s look, slim, pert and stylish, which rounds out into naturalism over the decades, before the joyous addition of colour when their author retires. They’re like newspaper cartoons for Ab and Celie’s marriage, documenting and commenting on the minutae of family life, as politics and war rumble in the background – when Hitler pops up, its to nix their annual trip to the seaside.

Danny’s approach is part thematic, part chronological. He carefully paces his own discoveries, the revelations about his shared past, as he moves from the first 1920s envelopes into the present, but also uses groups of linked envelopes to pull out broad themes like disability, aspiration, and the Jewish migration from Dalston to Golders Green. There are also smaller, quirkier motifs — like the family love of fishballs, and its male members’ inability to look like anything but a schmuck in a suit — which poke a cartoon finger at Danny’s own foibles, as well as pointing to a much wider Jewish experience, and its shifts and schizsms through the twentieth century.

Danny is an incredibly likeable storyteller – with Nick Philippou’s direction, he manages to feel like a fishball offering family friend, desperate to tell you about something great he’s just found. Every unfolding suprise feels like its fresh to him, too, still exciting. His interpretation of the pictures is precise without ever feeling didactic, but you can’t help learning a bit about looking as he points out easily-missed details, slumped shoulders here, a missing Sunday suit there, and offers gentle speculation on what Ab was trying to say.

The images aren’t postcards from a seaside holiday of a life; the pair’s annual trip to Westcliff was forever rained off. Instead, they shift from love letters to war dispatches to subtle digs to memorials to messages to Celie that, built on an emotional context we can’t dig up like old newspapers, can never be deciphered.

This brilliant performance has the same shifting feeling, sifting through crackling masses of paper to find grains of truth, and golden flashes of insight
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The GB Project

The GB Project was one of my favourite shows this Edinburgh, so I'm thrilled that it's found a London home at Calm Down Dear, the Camden People’s Theatre’s festival of feminism, on the 29^th and 30^th October. Definitely worth a trip.

Originally published on exeuntmagazine.com, August 2013 at http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/the-gb-project/

Kate Craddock

Even when there are no dragons to slay, heroes are important. The Bank of England’s recent changing of the guard of historical faces on banknotes, controversial counterparts to Scotland’s images of famous castles, stirred up feeling because of the underlying truths to which it pointed. Female heroes are less likely to emerge, more likely to be submerged, by a history that’s grounded in a firmly male canon of sword-wielding leaders. Kate Craddock’s one woman show unearths the split, fragmented story of Gertrude Bell, an archaeologist,writer, spy and traveller in the Middle East; half inspirational, heart-warming heroine in her North Eastern birthplace, half ambassador/betrayer to the countries she became so deeply enmeshed in.

It’s a journey told through people and memories, starting with her stilted visits to her newly-divorced father’s flat, concrete complexified by a Gertrude Bell memorial plaque. Craddock goes on to seek out the other, more voluntary custodians of Gertrude Bell’s treasures. She stages conversations with her own memories of Tyneside-accented Pat, a gentle and self-deprecating librarian who notes that GB’s adventures are so much wilder than anything she and her colleagues ever get up to, archivists, historians, and a post-doctoral scholar, writing on women and travel without ever venturing further than Paris. These verbatim, regional-accented snippets are spot-on, distinct and charming, like another kind of archive, audio evidence of her trail through paper and sand. Woven together with wonderfully acute observations, context and projected photos, they create a rich sense of the shared, local, female investment that keeps this dead explorer alive at home.

The structure is wittily, neatly managed; a timid foray into Gertrude Bell’s sex-life is book-ended by the more gently sensual offering of china cups of tea and custard creams. Craddock uses dates, emphasised with a step left or right, to mark her symmetrical movements back and forth from past to near-present. The same pieces of documentary evidence are mirrored, first as sweet, slide-show artefacts, then as incriminating evidence, as the analysis of Gertrude Bell’s involvement in the Middle East deepens.

The title seems confusing at first. This piece is about discovering Gertrude Bell, not Great Britain. But as its focus shifts from local to global, we learn that she drew the borders for present-day Iraq, and persuaded tribal leaders to support the British, and helped install a puppet king. The photos show what seems to us a gentle, quaint, china cup-clutching breed of diplomacy, afternoon tea among desert sands. Seen in the context of this diplomacy’s latter-day consequences, they point to a kind of disjunct in colonial self-image; explorers or invaders of territories, guardians or appropriators of cultures. Craddock brings out this disjunct, as the gentle cast of academia and GB’s own cut-glass voice are joined by Hillary Clinton and Condoleeza Rice, whose words use the soft language of conscience and domesticity to justify the unjustifiable invasion of Iraq. By combining the voices past and present, The GB Projectbuilds and gains the power of a political thesis, a passionate through-line through a muddled history.

The GB Project swells from a small, personal engagement to a sprawling trail of people and paper, a huge telescope look at Gertrude Bell’s place among the gentlemen travellers who toyed with and prodded at the Middle East with detached, still lingering entitlement, deposing rulers and redrawing boundaries. Bell is the only woman among men in their sober wool-suited groups, or Lawrence of Arabia horse parties. But as well as drawing attention to her petticoated singularity, Craddock’s piece also finds uniqueness in her humanity, and real love and respect for the leaders and people she won over. Gertrude Bell’s legacy in Iraq, and the National Museum of Iraq she founded, has been sacked and scattered, her diplomacy betrayed. Craddock’s dazzling performance seeks out and brings back the artifacts of her memory, tangible and intangible, and houses them in an intensely personal frame; impossible to forget
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Staging Middlemarch

This was a great set of interviews to do. I love Middlemarch, and all my cynicism and skepticism about adapting period novels for the stage was worn away at by talking to two people who clearly felt the same way, and were embarking on an immensely complex and carefully planned labour of love.

Originally published on exeuntmagazine.com, 25th October 2013 at http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/staging-middlemarch/

Middlemarch, for Virginia Woolf, was “the magnificent book that, with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Geoffrey Beevers is appropriately mature; steeped in theatre, he’s been turning out sporadic adaptations of George Eliot novels at the Orange Tree for decades – the first of them, Adam Bede (1990) winning a Time Out award. As he explained, he loves and endlessly rereads George Eliot – “she has such an amazingly intelligent compassionate mind, more so than other classical author” – so it was inevitable he’d come to tackle her most famous novel. “I’d always had it in my mind that I’d do Middlemarch – it’s such a wonderful story.” Wonderful, but also bold, comprehensive and precise – a huge challenge for a small space.

Middlemarch isn’t one of those novels seems to be struggling against the restrictions of the page – it feels neatly, meticulously adapted to its classically Victorian three volume format. It’s also polyphonic, with no single melody to be strummed out into a heart-tuggingly operatic stage narrative, soaring from high to low – its perfectly balanced counterpoints march evenly through the middle of provincial life towards mild, contented disappointment. So what will bringing it to the stage add?

Beevers’ passion for the novel is clear, and his aim is to heighten and share its text. He explains: “as a reader you can miss an enormous amount because your eye can dash over the words, and you don’t realise that there’s incredibly subtle wit spun through the whole work. It reveals so much more when you speak it out loud because you’re sharing it with an audience.” He alights on a passage describing the amiable, hapless Mr Brooke; the striking points in his appearance were his buff waistcoat, short-clipped blond hair, and neutral physiognomy.” Bursting with enthusiasm, he explains that its genius lies in the contrast between the “striking” politician Brooke will never be, and then the “three really dull mundane things about him, his ordinary face and dull waistcoat which make it such a brilliant sentence – it’s so easy for details like that to get lost.”

Georgina Strawson as Dorothea and Jamie Newall as Casubon

There’s plenty to get lost in; George Eliot’s novel combines epic length with several neatly balanced plots that interlock and comment on each other. Beevers has divided his adaptation into three plays, each following a single plot strand – “I realised that to do the whole of the novel, I’d need to split it up, so I’ve separated out the main themes.” He aims to offset the risks of losing Middlemarch’s broad narrative sweep, and the comprehensiveness implied in its subtitle, “A Study of Provincial Life,” by producing a cohesive trio of plays that interact as a set – “some parts overlap, so that you have the same scenes from a different angle.” It’s an approach that echoes George Eliot’s own self-conscious shifts in perspective. After a devastating passage on her young heroine’s“moral imprisonment” in a country house mired in unread books and pale pinioned stags, she asks “why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble,” before retelling the situation from her scholarly husband Casaubon’s view, in tones of brutally sustained irony.

This ironic detachment is important in Eliot, and it’s something Beevers is keen to foreground in his approach, which sounds tinged with story theatre – “ the whole cast shares her voice, the narration, and everybody has a bit of her ironic comment on the action in front of us.” He sees Middlemarch as a work where “the great ideals of life are not reflected in people’s achievements. People start out with tremendous idealism and belief in life, and are slowly brought up against the reality – Will thinks he’s a great romantic Goethe-type hero, then he turns out to enjoys practical politics, and Lydgate’s great ambitions get brought down to a narrow compass.” Dorothea’s marriage is similarly crushing, her talents famously, frustratingly spent “in channels which had no great name on earth,” but the novel is no bleak exercise in social realism. George Eliot’s keen observations of the personal and political are leavened with the humour and wit of characters like pragmatic Mary Garth, whose“down-to-earth morality” Geoffrey reads as a solution to the problems of the two other plots. There’s something similarly down-to-earth in Geoffrey’s approach, which aims is to “foreground the dramatic dilemmas” of the novel, in an approach that prizes the theatrical and dramatic over George Eliot’s simmering themes of political and social reform.

I wondered if Beevers’ focus on the text has an element of getting closer to the way in which people used to encounter these novels, through reading aloud from single, prized circulating library volumes. Beevers agreed, and elaborated that “It’s easy to look down on adaptations as heritage drama, but the Victorians themselves – ironically since they lived in a bad age for drama and a great age for novels – loved the theatre. I don’t think they would have objected to these novels being adapted for stage, and I don’t feel bad about adapting George Eliot’s work.” Still, there aren’t likely to be many of the lavish accouterments beloved of the Victorian stage, or of period dramas, as the specific challenges of the piece mean that “it won’t be naturalistic in the way it would be on television, with coaches and horses and all that stuff.” Designer Sam Dowson elaborated that “the watchword is storytelling, and the action just whizzes along, almost like a ballet – we had to design and make a chaise longue ourselves so we could just roll it on and off, and we had to costume for character, as there’s no stopping to change.”

David Ricardo-Pearce as Lydgate, the Doctor. Production photos by Robert Day.

Still, where Adam Bede, which Dowson also designed, “ticked along without any real set,Middlemarch as a novel is grander and more expansive,” demanding the creation of a complex visual system – the stage is divided into a gothic corner, a Neoclassical corner, a library corner and a yewtree corner, each housing a themed group of locations. Light is important, shining on each area in turn, and so is nature; Sam was inspired by “a tiny passage where she talks about a light shone on the random marks on a piece of steel” and, in George Eliot’s words, “the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun…The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.” This sense of reality’s vulnerabilities to the vagaries of individual perspective is exploited by her design’s evolution through the play cycle – what’s bare and sparse to austere Dorothea “fleshes out into an orchard and bowers of flowers as we reach Fred and Mary’s story, which is very much full of love.” The small size of the Orange Tree has its own challenges, but also clear advantages for Sam’s designs – “it’s very intimate, so it’s easy to create oppressive domestic interiors, and a sense of connection between the characters.”

The Orange Tree is a venue that Beevers has always come back to – “I started as an actor almost the first year it opened, in a room above the pub in the 1970s. I was struck by the possibility of enormous themes in very small spaces – we did King Lear, and Caucasian Chalk Circle, and it was wonderfully exciting to have great drama staged with that simplicity. You hear things that you don’t hear on a big stage sometimes, when you don’t have all the big production numbers and elaborate sets.”

For Beevers, “acting is how I make my living,” and that means bigger venues, bigger names, whether on new season Dr Who or, most recently, dancing attendance on Helen Mirren as an equerry in The Audience. He’s found that“it’s been a long time working Middlemarch out, in between various jobs, and finding a way to make each of the three stories self contained. When you’ve seen all three plays you’ve got a vision of the whole book, and although you could see them in any order, I think it’s best to see them in the right order.” As the plays open in staggered style, twenty days apart, bringing Beevers’ vision of Middlemarch to the Orange Tree will be a similarly long process, gently unfolding as the evenings darken from autumn to winter. It seems apt.

Middlemarch: Dorothea’s Story, runs from 23rd October-30th January, Middlemarch: The Doctor’s Story, from 13th November-31st January, and Middlemarch: Fred and Mary from 4th December-1st February, at the Orange Tree Theatre, London. There are trilogy days on 27th and 28th December 2013, and the 4th, 18th and 25th January 2014.