Dickens' Women
Dickens' Women, Sydney Theatre, October 15-21; ph: (02) 9250 1999 or www.ticketek.com.au
Miriam Margolyes is an increasingly frequent visitor to Australia and threatens to not only live here when she can but also to retire here at some point. This presupposes that the world-wide demand for her unique talents will dry up any time soon.
Margolyes has been amusing, entertaining and charming audiences in theatres, on TV and in cinemas for 40 years now. And rather than waning, the love affair between the actress and her vast constituency is growing deeper and ever more affectionate.
A household face if still a name to stumble over (Mar-go-lees), the quintessentially English-Jewish-Belarussian actress-comedienne-raconteuse has been winning over a new generation - as well as many old ones - to the works and life of Charles Dickens with her one-woman show Dickens' Women.
Over time it has developed into a simple yet sophisticated two hour performance of astonishing depth and versatility. Margolyes morphs effortlessly from unctuous beadle to flibbertigibbet gels; from tragic Miss Havisham to dreadful old drunk Mrs Gamp and on through some 23 characters and situations taken direct from the great storyteller's novels.
Margolyes' clear-eyed passion for and now, profound knowledge of Dickens' work was the subject of the BBC/ABC television series Dickens in America. It was written and presented by Margolyes whose career has been to make millions laugh but who graduated from Cambridge and is a considerable scholar in her own right. She has an OBE among numerous awards and you have to wonder when her alma mater will get around to bestowing an honorary doctorate on one of its more intellectually rigorous products. (She is a professor, of course, but that's at Hogwarts where as Prof Sprout she has taught Harry Potter and his pals.)
Meanwhile, however, the delight and awe generated by Margolyes’ tour de force performance in Dickens’ Women was palpable on opening night in the capacity crowd at Sydney Theatre. It’s a theatrical event to see and savour in the flesh because, as Margolyes says in her program notes: “I don’t approve of program notes because I want theatre to communicate itself directly to you, the audience, without any filters or interventions. That is theatre’s great strength and it’s why I have never allowed Dickens’ Women to be filmed. I want to offer you a purely theatrical experience: the camera doesn’t allow illusion.”
Her love of Dickens and living breathing theatre is established in that pronouncement and her unique ability to deliver everything she promises is without parallel. Margolyes has been pretty amazing for decades; these days superlatives are inadequate.
