Inspired by true events, GEORGE is a bold new play reclaiming the forgotten queer history of one of Europe’s most radical writers.

Inspired by true events, GEORGE is a bold new play reclaiming the forgotten queer history of one of Europe’s most radical writers. In 19th-century France, George Sand defied convention through what she wrote, what she wore and who she loved — yet history has worked hard to smooth her edges. Following a West End showcase and a critically acclaimed London run at Omnibus Theatre, this “absorbing drama” (The Stage) comes to Lowry from Thursday 5th to Saturday 7th of March.

France. 1839.  When famous disobedient writer George Sand finds herself at a creative standstill, with an empty wallet, her desperate need for an idea leads her quill to the most intimate and dangerous place she has ever explored: herself. 
Embarking on her most daring work yet with the help of her lover Marie Dorval, she is caught in a perfect storm of love, queerness and others’ expectations.

How far will she have to bend to make her story heard?

Writer Léa des Garets says: “We’ve reinvented George Sand. I knew she wore men's clothes, had lovers of all genders and seemed to live freely... and yet I hadn't heard or read nearly as much about her as I did about her male contemporaries! I found a soul sister, two centuries apart. Along the way, I found Gabriel (1839), which compiled everything that fascinated me about George Sand: her ground-breaking interrogations on gender, on women's education, on equality, on sexuality... and I wanted to talk about her relationship with Marie Dorval. "The inseparables", people called them. In the correspondence we have, there are a few years missing. And there isn't much written around the time she wrote Gabriel in Marseille, in 1839... So, I thought: what if we could reimagine what happened then?"                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Léa des Garets (she/they) is an award-winning actor and writer from France. She started her career in the performing arts as co-founder of Night Train Theatre Company, beginning at the Edinburgh Fringe and touring in the UK and in Ukraine. She was part of PROJEKT EUROPA’s EMPOWER, which champions migrant theatre talent in the UK. Through their company MQT Productions, Léa aims to give more visibility to hidden voices from the past and the present, focusing on international voices, female-led narratives and the LGBTQIA+ community.

GEORGE centres queer voices both onstage and off, recovering a legacy too often flattened or ignored. The production forms part of MQT Productions’ wider artistic mission to amplify untold histories and foreground LGBTQIA+ and female-led narratives within classical and contemporary theatre. Blending sharp humour, intimacy and political urgency, the play explores gender nonconformity, desire, artistic freedom and the violence of erasure. It places a modern lens on a 19th-century life that feels startlingly current.