As part of the celebrations for Coventry’s year as UK City of Culture, Dash Arts present The Great Middlemarch Mystery from the novel Middlemarch by George Eliot, one of the UK’s most celebrated authors who set her story in the city and was born in nearby Nuneaton.
This immersive promenade performance runs 7-10 April in multiple, rarely seen locations throughout Coventry city centre, and tickets are now on sale.
The cast are; George Beach, Andrew Cullum, Tom Gordon, Amanda Hurwitz, Aimee Powell, Deborah Tracey, Ryan Van Champion and Joan Walker.
Part-immersive theatre production and part-mystery game, The Great Middlemarch Mystery puts a modern twist on George Eliot’s Middlemarch and its story of the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and scandals lived out within a Midlands town, 150 years after it was first published in 1871. Audiences follow the interwoven lives of the townsfolk of Middlemarch as they meet with triumph and ruin and help them unearth a terrible secret at its heart. Who is the stranger with unfinished business in Middlemarch? And what is the meaning of his untimely death? Gathering clues as the drama unfolds between four historic venues in central Coventry, audiences then come together to solve the mystery in this interactive adventure.
The Great Middlemarch Mystery is the first part of a season of work by Dash Arts entitled Albion, which is an exploration of modern Englishness, in all its complexity. Spanning the next four years, the season searches for a contemporary English identity that reflects the reality and diversity of the country we live in today.
Dash Arts will journey across landscape and language, digging deep into folk and written histories, oral traditions, music, storytelling, theatre, and performance. Working closely with participants, audiences, and artists throughout the country, to embark on a process of interrogation into how England presents itself today, its colonial legacy, and what remains unseen.
Featuring new commissions from some of England’s most exciting artists as well as extraordinary creatives from around the globe, Albion will include live and digital Dash Cafés, gigs, workshops, and performances across England, culminating in a major production in 2024-2025.
Dash Arts creates exceptional artistic experiences that bridge divides across art forms, cultures, languages, and communities. Over the last 15 years, they have created award-winning new work with over 9,000 artists and participants for audiences of over 350,000 worldwide. Previous productions include the ground-breaking international music event Lyrical Alliance at London’s Roundhouse, the double Olivier-award winning Babel, and the Indian A Midsummer Night’s Dream which played sell-out seasons with the RSC in Stratford and at the Roundhouse before touring worldwide.
Artistic Director and co-founder of Dash Arts, Josephine Burton is the director and creator of over 80 new pieces of award-winning cross art-form work, producer of over 300 gigs with venues including Barbican Centre, Royal Albert Hall, Oval Space, Roundhouse, Sadler’s Wells, and Southbank Centre, music advisor for the PRS Foundation, and professional vocalist and the host of Dash Arts Podcast, Cafés, and Events. Recent directing highlights include Songs for Babyn Yar, Dash Arts Dacha, Dash Eurosquat, Dash Arts Forum with Tate Modern, British Library, Latitude Festival, and other festivals; Lyrical Alliance and Renegade Orchestra. She also commissioned Olivier-Award- winning Babel by Sidi Larbi Cherkoaui, Damien Jalet, and Antony Gormley at Sadler’s Wells and new work with choreographer Hofesh Shechter, The Table with Blind Summit, Lemony Snicket’s Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming with Tall Stories, and new work with jazz ensemble F-IRE Collective.
Josephine said, ‘Coventry was the inspiration for George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and its communities, stories, and buildings are at the very heart of this production. There are almost 100 named characters in her original novel and The Great Middlemarch Mystery will invite actors, our community cast of performers, and audiences to step inside and inhabit her world. Our Production will be at the same time both 19th-century Middlemarch and 1980s Coventry, reinterpreting this classic novel that on so many levels still resonates today’.
Ruth Livesey is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Thought and Head of the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has a life-long passion for Victorian literature and bringing those books – especially Eliot’s works – to new audiences. In 2019-20, she was an Arts and Humanities Leadership Fellow, working on a project titled ‘Provincialism: Literature and the Cultural Politics of Middleness in Britain 1800-1900’
