There’s a nagging irony at the centre of Bird Grove. This play about the young Mary Ann Evans – aka future literary titan George Eliot – features copious scenes of her expressing frustration that only men have a voice in society. But the play itself is very much written by a man, Alexi Kaye Campbell. It more or less styles this out, but there are lines where you wonder how Campell wrote them with a straight face.
Maybe I’m being unfair as really Bird Grove is about two people: Mary Ann and her father, Owen Teale’s Robert Evans. A slightly cringe epilogue aside, Campbell’s play barely alludes to Eliot, but is firmly concerned with Mary Ann, a brilliant and unconventional young woman who nonetheless desperately needs her dad.
Teale’s Robert is a gruff middle class widower who is paying a small fortune for the titular abode in fashionable 1840s Coventry, essentially in an effort to engage with society and bag his beloved daughter a suitable husband. He’s doing this out of care: independent women weren’t really a thing at the time and in the opening scene he’s shown to be both indulgent of Mary Ann and her unconventional friends – including a flamboyant French hypnotist! - and intolerant of douchebag suitors, giving Jonnie Broadbent’s amusingly pathetic suitor Horace short shrift. He wants to make sure she’s looked after.
Matters between them become tested when Mary Ann works up the courage to tell her dad that she no longer wants to go to church as she no longer believes. Finally, the pair really do clash. But Campbell’s writing is careful and empathetic. Delau’s Mary Ann isn’t an obnoxious prodigy lashing out against daddy – she loves him deeply and in many ways her refusal to go to church is purely a desire to not be a hypocrite. For his part Teale’s Robert is a stern but nurturing man motivated less by unthinking adherence to tradition and more by his understanding of society and fear that Mary Ann will be desperately vulnerable - possibly even destitute - without him.
It’s an enjoyable, sensitive and heartfelt play, given a trundling but very serviceable period production by director Anna Ledwich. Although Dulau has acted on the London stage before, this is her first lead role and first thing she’s done in a theatre since Andor made her a star. It’s interesting that her part in the acclaimed Star Wars show was also a father-daughter thing - her character Kleya was the adopted daughter to Stellan Skarsgård’s spymaster Luthen, a relationship that became increasingly complicated as the show wore on. Dulau gives good ‘troubled daughter’, and despite a similarly poignant connection with Teale, it’s a very different performance. Her Mary Ann is sweet, enthusiastic and unguarded, progressive because she’s smart, well read and too earnest not to see the world as it really is.
It’s not a radical or earthshaking show, but fans of stately period dramas with a feminist twinkle won’t go away disappointed. Teale is great and Dulau shows she can hold a stage as well as a screen. Its real strength, though, is its sweet and rare depiction of the beauty of a loving bond between a father and a daughter.
