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.