“The play actually opens with the dunking of a witch,” Lockhart explains. “With all the recent commentary on women and witches, drowning them underwater, you really do think, ‘Gosh, how far have we actually come?’ It was this bizarre turn of events that happened around a week before we went into rehearsals. You’re there reading [the script] at home in your bedroom thinking, ‘Oh yeah, we’re talking about witches, what they thought of women back in the olden days’. And then the next thing, on commercial radio are these comments of dunking women underwater, and you just stop. In that sense, I think it illuminates where we are and keeps those questions at hand. Here I am listening to this story set in a faraway land with different accents, but talking about things that are actually still really close to home.”
The story of Maggie Tulliver, here portrayed by three different performers across various ages of her life, is one that will certainly resonate with much of its audience. Full of fate, family, and love, The Mill on the Floss is very much a text of frustration; that of Maggie’s character, certainly, but also of Evan’s own struggles with social acceptance: maintaining a 20-year affair with a married man; determined to not find herself contributing to the ‘silly novels’ she saw published by her female contemporaries; to be taken seriously as a literary voice; rejecting her family’s faith. To say Evans was something of a trailblazer is an understatement.
“I think [director] Tanya Gerstle’s intention was to explore this woman’s life, who was largely ahead of her time. To provide a space and a context, Tanya is a female theatre maker of course, and there are so many female stories that don’t get told for one reason or another. George Eliot, of course, no one knew was a woman for a long time, and there’s an irony to that as well since Floss isn’t her best known work and not many people know it. I think the reason that this particular novel is explored in the adaptation by Helen Edmundson is because it’s largely autobiographical. In the exploration of the play, we’re also exploring George Eliot.”
As Maggie ages, struggling against the cultural confines of a small English town, her physical and emotional development is mirrored in the performers themselves. Not simply in their appearance or elaborate staging, but through a method spearheaded by Gerstle called Pulse.
“The actors on this show have all trained or worked with Tanya in some capacity in the past. Tanya was up until quite recently was one of the acting teachers at the Victorian College of the Arts, so this is the culmination of around 15 years of training. In terms of process, Tanya developed Pulse. It’s basically approaching the text through impulses in the body. It means that the text and the body are the most important things, so you’ll have the text fed into the space, and then a physical score will develop from any kind of impulses that come to the actor. You basically make the show from this physical score. Usual staging in mainstream theatre is probably more, ‘Yeah, we’ve got this text, you can stand there and when you say this, I’ll move over here.’ This comes directly from the text, and gives the actor the agency to make those decisions based on their impulses. It sounds a bit ‘wafty-dofty’ when I talk about it, but it really serves the work. You’re not just making something up that is exterior to the language. It’s actually coming from within you.”
It has brought great physicality to the production, though the show should by no means be considered experimental; the ensemble remains faithful to Evans’ original story, from nine-year old Maggie’s early life with her brother Tom, to her potential suitors, through to its tragic denouement. It is a method that allows the cast to fully embrace their characters, responding fluidly and naturally to the environment, rather than follow the rails of conventional blocking.
“In theory, no matter what method you use, this is the goal as an actor. You want every night to feel different, you want to be present and available to the space and character and other performers. It’s not a prop heavy show, so wherever we can we use bodies and gesture to create an image or an animal. It’s quite a sophisticated way of working, I think, to use the body in a really intelligent way that doesn’t look like you’re playing out something. It can really surprise you, and audiences are quite smart. They don’t need a lot. If you have beautiful words and people being real on stage, you can create stories so well.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
