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by Miriam Margolyes and Sonia Fraser, directed by Sonia Fraser

Richard Jordan Productions Ltd., Young Centre, Toronto

December 12-15, 2012

“I want to be something so much worthier than the doll in the doll’s house.” Bella in Our Mutual Friend

Miriam Margolyes’ international tour of her acclaimed one-woman show Dickens’ Women stops in Toronto for four performances only.  If you love Charles Dickens, fine acting or both, catch it if you can.  Not only is it immensely entertaining and informative, but Margolyes, who plays 23 characters, gives a tour de force performance that will leave you lost in admiration.

British actor Margolyes is probably best known to North American audiences as Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter movies.  She first created Dickens’ Women with director Sonia Fraser for the 1989 Edinburgh Festival.  After presenting it again at the Edinburgh Festival, Margolyes is taking it on tour this year as part of the bicentennial celebrations of Charles Dickens’ birth.

Despite the title, the play is not so much an anthology surveying the women that Dickens created as it is a portrait of Dickens supported by examples of select female characters in his novels and tales.  Margolyes chooses examples to illustrate specific points about Dickens.  Therefore, Miss Havisham and Estella are there from Great Expectations, but the kindly Clara Peggotty and Pip’s Aunt Betsy Trotwood are not.  Margolyes gives Dickens’ description of Ada Clare from Bleak House and finishes the show with an impression of Miss Flite from the same novel, but does not mention more salient figures like Lady Dedlock or the main character, Esther Summerson. 

The main point Margolyes and Fraser make is that Dickens drew his characters from life and his portraits of women reflect both women he knew and the complex prejudices he developed toward the opposite sex in the course of his life.  The play therefore does not proceed chronologically through Dickens’ works but chronologically through his relations with women with Margolyes illustrating each point with an amazing diversity of impressions.

The show opens with Margolyes’ hilarious impersonation of Sarah Gamp, the inebriated layer-out of corpses from Martin Chuzzlewit, before she launches into her thesis.  Dickens understood poverty and the desire to rise out of it because he lived in those circumstances.  He adored his grandparents but hated his mother for making him go back to work in a blacking factory at age seven when he had just been released from it.  His ideal woman was a placid innocent, preferably aged 17.  She appears in numerous incarnations like Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop throughout his works.  This Margolyes relates to the fact that his beloved sister-in-law Mary Hogarth died in his arms at 17 and that Dickens asked to be buried next to her.  Dickens’ fascination with young women has a negative side in that he fell into affairs with them while neglecting his wife Catherine, who had born and raised his ten surviving children.  When he seeks a separation from her in order to live with her younger sister Georgina, his cruelty to Catherine by publicly shaming her in print is astonishing.

Margolyes and Fraser’s unflattering biographical background helps to undercut any mood of nostalgia or sentimentality that have accrued to Dickens over time and they help us see his portrayals of women in a clearer light.  Dickens’ scorn of women who are overweight like Flora Finching in Little Dorrit or seek to be alluring in old age like Mrs. Skewton in Dombey and Son are obvious examples of how Dickens’ private prejudices could create certain characters.  More often, however, what Margolyes shows is the artist in Dickens taking over from the man.  Mrs. Micawber from Great Expectations could be seen as merely a comic figure, but as Margolyes plays her we see her struggling to put a good face on the underlying sadness of the loss of the gentility of her past life. 

The most moving portrait of all is that of Miss Wade from Bleak House, a lesbian who laments that the girl she loves deliberately torments her by flirting with others.  Margolyes begins Act 2 with the most comic scene of all – the wooing scene between Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney from Oliver Twist that mingles love with financial practicality.  The scene also proves that Margolyes is equally adept at playing male characters as female and can twist her face into a Cruikshank caricature at will.  Indeed, when she plays out an interview between Miss Havisham and Pip from Great Expectations, you turn about to see where a small boy has come from only to see that Margolyes has incredibly transformed her voice. 

To give the show a 19th-century flavour, Fraser has interspersed Margolyes’ illustrated lecture with salon pieces played on the piano, in this case by well-known pianist Peter Tiefenbach, whom Margolyes deservedly praised.  Tiefenbach sometimes plays music to underscore passages that Margolyes acts out thus giving us a sense of melodrama in its original sense – drama accompanied by music – so popular in Dickens’ time.  For a touring show, Dickens’ Women has a sophisticated lighting design by Sarah Quinney, that creates a sense of theatricality as well as setting the tone of every scene.  Miss Wade’s lament, for instance, is set nearly in total black with just a pinspot on the speaker’s face.

We are extraordinarily lucky that the Young Centre has brought this marvellous show to Toronto for its month-long Dickens celebration.  You will leave bowled over by Margolyes’ ability to capture so perfectly such an enormous range of voices and personalities.  You may wonder whether Canada has become so obsessed with creating “stars” that it has neglected the cultivation of character actors of equal or superior ability.  If you haven’t read a Dickens recently or have only read the better-known titles, Margolyes will make you seek out one you haven’t read because, as she demonstrates with such infectious enthusiasm, all his works are shot through with veins of gold.

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Miriam Margolyes. ©2012 Prudence Upton.

For tickets, visit www.youngcentre.ca.