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Canberra Today 15°/18° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

The women in Dickens’ life

Miriam Margolyes... fell in love with Charles Dickens at age 11 on first reading “Oliver Twist”.

LAST week I was invited to a very special birthday party in Sydney.

Charles Dickens had turned 200 on February 7 and Miriam Margolyes, that empress of Dickensian artistry, flanked by her British director Sonia Fraser, was hovering over a beautifully-sculpted cake in the shape of a Dickens book, wondering whether to cut it.

The Greeks, the Egyptians, the Chinese and the Italians love Dickens. We love him just about as much and his many followers last week even included members of the Jane Austen Society. To all his fans, it seems, the great man of letters is alive today as ever he was.

Margolyes, known to kids as Professor Sprout in “Harry Potter” and to others as the nurse in Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo and Juliet”, will also soon appear in ABC TV’s “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” series.

But she is most celebrated for her pièce de résistance, “Dickens’ Women”, her tribute to the author she fell in love with at age 11 on first reading “Oliver Twist”.

She and Fraser originally wrote it for the Edinburgh Festival in 1989 and we saw it here in 2007. Now entrepreneur Andrew McKinnon is reviving it for a 200th anniversary world tour that finishes in Chicago during December. We’ll get to see it this month.

Margolyes was in fine form at the party, thrilled to be back portraying Dickens’ silliest and truest characters, but equally determined to dispel any idea of him as a cheery soul ready to dispense Christmas puddings and largess.

On the contrary, she says, her closer study of his life shows a dark side.

“He’s a surprising man, much crueller than people expect,” she says.

Margolyes aims to shock. Who knew about his obsession with 17-year-old girls? And who, until she told us so, guessed that the abandoned bride Miss Havisham in “Great Expectations” is really a portrayal of Dickens himself?

She admitted to us that she and Fraser had occasionally felt nauseated by his chauvinistic view of women, seen in his portrayal of faithful Mrs Micawber (“I will never desert Mr Micawber”) or in his vicious portrayal of Flora Finching in “Little Dorrit”, Dickens’ revenge on the real-life youthful sweetheart who had, quite unforgivably, grown old.

Audiences who pack in to see the characters come to life will not be disappointed. A chameleon of the stage, Margolyes takes us inside personalities drawn from “Martin Chuzzlewit”, “Nicholas Nickleby”, “The Old Curiosity Shop” and more famous works, as well as lesser-known stories such as “Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings”.

Oh, yes, and there’s a book about the show. Who can doubt Margolyes will be on hand to sign it?

 

 

“Dickens’ Women”, The Playhouse, February 23-25. Bookings to 6375 2700 or www.canberratheatre.com.au

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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