BIRD GROVE

Hampstead Theatre

★★★★

“a confident production, keen to entertain and doing so with ease”

As a debate rages about the death of reading, award-winning playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell comes at us with an easily digestible and endlessly spirited primer on George Eliot.

This new play comes bookended with a slice of drawing room farce at the beginning to ease us in – think Malvolio courting Elizabeth Bennet – and a curiously on-the-nose coda at the end. This is in case we still haven’t figured out that headstrong Mary Ann Evans is destined to become the author of Middlemarch under a gender-swapping nom de plume.

For the most part, though, this is an engrossing and serious study of a young woman loved and wronged repeatedly; a victim of her age, her sex and her voracious curiosity.

To 1840s Coventry then, and Bird Grove, for this fact-based origin story.

The setting (Sarah Beaton) conveys an elegant five rooms simply devised on a rotating stage. This is the home of Robert Evans (Owen Teale) who has worked all his life to acquire such a property, a bowerbird’s nest in which to show off his unmarried daughter Mary Ann (Elizabeth Dulau).

But bird’s fly and nests are emptied, and that is certainly in the mind of Mary Ann who decides one day, after much turmoil, not to accompany her father to church. She doesn’t believe in the dogma of religion nor the marketplace of singletons.

The declaration is shocking.

In the face of this stand, one is stubborn, the other is wilful. And vice versa.

They are barely separate creatures in that regard.

Despite the fissure, there is always a chance of rapprochement. It is beautifully touching that twice widowed Robert Evans is exasperated and infuriated by his daughter’s defiance – but also proud in his own contained way.

He is a simple man, plain spoken, a grafter of no great insight. Except in this matter.

When smug allies and “free thinkers” Mr and Mrs Bray (Tom Espiner and Rebecca Scroggs) try to arbitrate, they list Mary Ann’s many talents. He has the perfect riposte to their snobbery.

“You are intelligent people and astute at least in spotting my daughter’s genius, but how astounding that you have not entertained the notion that I have spotted it myself.”

It’s true. An estate manager by profession, he knows how to rescue pigs from their own muck, but he also knows what possesses his daughter, even though he cannot fully come to terms with her significance.

Despite a nine-strong cast, the play is a classic double act of opposites – young and old, parent and child, traditional and progressive – rendering the early toilet troubles of silly suitor Horace Garfield (a winning Jonnie Broadbent) and other farcical diversions into something forgettable.

The chemistry, diffidence and opposition of father and daughter is key. Owen Teale as Robert is a towering man, a thunderous spirit and yet strangely uncertain for much of the play. But he discovers a resounding and unshakeable timbre when his convictions are truly challenged.

And Elizabeth Dulau as Mary Ann is as bright and fresh as the country morning – perspicacious, revolutionary, chafing at the yoke and aching to meet her destiny. If Dulau wasn’t a star already – thanks to Andor – this performance would bring her to notice. She embodies the duel of duty and ambition but retains crystal clarity throughout.

There are some quirks in the production – the language is a hybrid of formality and modern idioms and the business with the French mesmerist (James Staddon) seems – again – unnecessary. Meanwhile, Anna Ledwich’s graceful direction can sometimes become stilted.

But this is a confident production, keen to entertain and doing so with ease.

BIRD GROVE

Hampstead Theatre

Reviewed on 23rd February 2026

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Johan Persson

BIRD GROVE

★★★★

“he writer goes in decidedly oblique directions at every juncture”

Orphans director Al Miller says he ploughed through dozens of scripts looking for his next project. His mission: something with “real voltage”.

He alighted upon Lyle Kessler’s taut three-hander and thought, “It’s going to be a ride!”

The play has an impeccable pedigree from its 1983 LA roots with stars such as Albert Finney, Jesse Eisenberg and Alec Baldwin sinking their teeth into the deliciously ripe dialogue, with actors given meaty mouthfuls to chew up and spit out.

The set-up is this. Orphan brothers Treat and Phillip live in a rundown Philadelphia row house. Treat, with psychopathic tendencies, goes out into the world to rob innocents while tender and simple Phillip stays at home as a recluse fearing that if he were to step outside, he would die from his allergies.

Treat likes it this way, with Phillip cloistered at home. He cares for his sibling in his own demented way and strikes down any attempt by his docile brother to better himself. Treat is mutely terrified by the prospect of the boy moving on – the shadow of abandonment running through the entire piece.

One spring day, Treat brings home Harold, a middle-aged businessman, drunk beyond his wits and telling tales of his own motherless past. Handsomely dressed, Harold has stocks and bonds in his briefcase. With Harold tied to a chair, Treat heads downtown to see if he can find a friend who might pay to release the man they assume to be a well-upholstered industrialist.

But it doesn’t turn out that way. Harold is not a doughy journeyman in a natty suit but something altogether more intriguing. All conventions are upended. “You’re supposed to be a kidnap victim,” insists Treat.

There are inevitable notes of Pinter – in the covert menace – and Mamet – in the masculine hierarchies – but the writer goes in decidedly oblique directions at every juncture. Power gets passed around like a cheap bottle of vodka as relationships blossom and fracture in the most unexpected ways.

The credibility of this engrossing narrative relies on the performances. Here, there is not a flaw. Chris Walley as thuggish Treat is intimidating and rangy. Fred Woodley Evans manages to convey Phillip without the tendentious sentimentality to which such a role might succumb.

At the heart of the matter, and showcasing a career of craft, charm and presence, is Forbes Masson as Harold, swivelling on a sixpence from violence to empathy to comedy to wit, all to dazzle and confuse the brothers.

Imagine a cross between Tony Soprano and Papa Smurf.

At no point are his true motives transparent – he doesn’t appear interested in escape or revenge. In fact, you could probably construct a plausible theory that Harold is a figment of the boys’ imagination, filling in for the father figure their lives so obviously lack.

The play, ornamented by Sarah Beaton’s distressed set, is never less than electrifying, as the director had hoped. The story never goes where you think it might – or even should. Although this erratic tendency brings with it the peril of tonal uncertainty, the sure performances always take the production back to solid ground.

In theory, Kessler’s Orphans should be a conventional genre piece about gangsters and violence. It is not. It is something far more bamboozling. Expect the unexpected.

Tag Archives: Sarah Beaton

BIRD GROVE

★★★★

Hampstead Theatre

BIRD GROVE

Hampstead Theatre

★★★★

“a confident production, keen to entertain and doing so with ease”