Royal Shakespeare Company's Middlemarch finds its footing — SkimNews
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- Royal Shakespeare Company staged George Eliot's Middlemarch, the Guardian poll-topping "World's Greatest Novel," in two parts totalling almost six hours including intervals, directed by Jeremy Herrin from a script by Nina Raine.
- Part One compresses the roughly 900-page novel into brisk plot-and-pace costume drama, leaving Sir James Chettam "featureless," Celia in the same unfashionable frock and Will Ladislaw "barely there," with philosophical reflection only momentary.
- Amanda Root plays the omniscient narrator as George Eliot herself — watching, listening and interrupting characters mid-scene — an inventive way to deliver backstory without clumsy exposition that initially feels too much like a device, but by Part Two her interventions become "a lovely, tender texture".
- Part Two "doesn't take a wrong step": Dorothea (Nia Towle), now widowed, carries great depths, the marriage of debt-worn Lydgate (Andrew Richardson) and Rosamond (Emma McDonald) is heartbreaking, and Dorothea's romance with Ladislaw (Rory Alexander) is "heady, intense" and "grownup."
- Nathan Feeney's piano music, "so mannered" in the first half, becomes emotionally integrated in the second, where each performer excels and the marital friction "would feel utterly contemporary" without the 19th-century costumes.
- Nina Raine's script leans into Eliot's satire of middle England with bumptious broadness that "verges on pantomime," with Peter Featherstone (Peter Forbes) played "like a provincial Scrooge" and his greedy family arranged as Dickensian types.
- Tom McCarthy argued in a London Review of Books podcast that Middlemarch has been "middlebrowed" and "heritage-industried to death" — a risk the first half appeared to run before the second half redeemed the production.
Why it matters: Nearly six hours split across two parts, the first half compresses a 900-page novel into thin characterisation and near-pantomime humour; the second half answers Tom McCarthy's charge that Middlemarch has been "heritage-industried to death" by making marital disappointment feel contemporary, with every performer excelling.
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