This is a play about George Eliot when she was known only as Mary Ann Evans, in her 20s and living in a respectable corner of Coventry in the 1840s with her father. Played by Elizabeth Dulau, she is not yet the formidably unconventional woman she would become.
Evans would later scandalise the genteel society that her upwardly mobile father, Robert (Owen Teale), was so desperate to please, not least so he could get a decent marriage secured for this clever, spirited daughter. Evans would go on to befriend free-thinkers, cohabit with a man and write some of the most celebrated and humane works of fiction in the English literary canon. Playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell shows the seeds of all those facets of her life here, in her family home of Bird Grove.
