Everyone agrees that the end of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss is a disappointment. Suddenly and without much ceremony Eliot has Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom drowned in a flood. It's a finale that has baffled and frustrated readers for more than a century and half. Can anything be salvaged from this shocking twist?

Director Tanya Gerstle has a solution, and it's a good one. Using an adaptation of the book by British playwright Helen Edmundson, Gerstle projects the image of the drowned siblings backwards onto the narrative as if it were an organising metaphor. Thus, Maggie and Tom are drowning from the beginning, and their lives are only a futile struggle toward a surface that they can never reach.