Suddenly, theatre is firing on its newest cylinders. Immersive ingenuity, political fantasy, choreography that stretches the vocabulary of the stage.
Coventry, currently the UK city of culture, is the real star of The Great Middlemarch Mystery. Josephine Burton and Ruth Livesey’s Dash Arts adaptation of George Eliot’s novel, which Burton directs, moves the action from the 1830s to the 1980s and sets it in a series of 18th-century buildings near the city centre. The audience piece together the plot by running after characters as they move around the cobbled streets. At one end of the town hall, firebrand Will Ladislaw is promoting his radical newspaper; at the other, women gather for a sewing bee. In Mr Bulstrode’s bank – polished wood and carriage clocks – dodgy money is changing hands. In the bar at the Green Dragon, a bearded villain slumps drunk in an armchair.
