Senne Vercouteren
At the Orange Tree Theatre, the cosy playhouse in Richmond, this winter’s attraction is The Middlemarch Trilogy, based on George Eliot’s famous novel of 1874. Adapted and directed by Geoffrey Beevers, the story is split into three main strands of narrative and presented in three plays, of which this reviewer saw The Doctor’s Story. The theatre insists that they can be seen in any order, and there are even days you can witness them in marathon.
The focus in this instalment is on Mr Lydgate, who arrives in Middlemarch an idealistic and energetic young doctor, but quickly finds that compromise and manipulation are unavoidable, and that playing by their rules is the only way to go forward. Dreams of scientific discoveries and real love are replaced by treating rich people’s gout and an ordinary marriage.
The task of staging Eliot cannot be a particularly easy one, and scene after scene it becomes more apparent that Beevers has done a very good job indeed. The text is genuine and has retained its subtleties and cleverness, while the pace is there, and direct speech and narrative playfully alternate.
Very strong acting throughout makes the production stand up and creates a sense of relevance. David Ricardo-Pearce as Mr Lydgate, whose descent into the bourgeois realities of Middlemarch is convincing, and Christopher Ettridge as Mr Bulstrode the banker, both deserve special mention. The latter shocks when his evil side is revealed and he induces the death of an unwelcome acquaintance.
Clever use of doubling works well, both in terms of the audience’s enjoyment of seeing the same actor do very different things, but also on a more sophisticated level: often opposing personalities are played by the same person, perhaps a nod to Eliot’s layered characters who are never only one thing, good or bad, but real people of flesh and blood.
As the story unfolds, the narrator’s voice is always there to remind us that the book is the basis for the play; the unseen author is represented by all actors alike, often interspersing their own lines (a funny device when one character, very ill, jumps up from his sickbed to deliver the narrative, only to fall back again straight after).
The Orange Tree is a theatre-in-the-round, which carries specific implications for any staging – the actor cannot face the entire audience at any one time, for instance. Under Beevers’s direction, this is turned to the play’s advantage, the actors having to twist and turn quite a bit, making for a dynamic picture. The choreography overall is a pleasant response to the text, and is one of a number of ways in which the historic novel is brought to life.
The actors rarely actually leave the stage, but instead sit amongst the audience and deliver lines from those seats. Besides, again, creating dynamism on what is truly not a very large stage, it might also be a metaphor for the way in which everyone is always implicated by what is going on in Middlemarch.
Fast-paced and well-acted, The Doctor’s Story succeeds in reminding us of Eliot as a masterful writer in a narrative that has not lost its relevance and addresses the burdens of society on people who are never one-dimensional. This production is well worth a journey to Richmond.
The Middlemarch Trilogy is playing the Orange Tree Theatre until 1 February 2014. For more information and tickets, see the Orange Tree Theatre.