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REVIEWS
A Dickens of a time promised review
By Cameron Woodhead, THE AGE
I RECENTLY listened to an audio-book of Miriam Margolyes reading Oliver Twist. Her speaking voice was so soothing and beautifully inflected, it was like sitting by an enchanted stream. But the real magic came with the dialogue, when Margolyes burst into character, and the men, women and children of the novel - the swinish beadles, dying mothers and tremulous orphans - sprang fully formed into the imagination.
Margolyes (pictured) is an extraordinary character actress. Her one-woman show, Dickens' Women, is a tribute both to her infectious passion for Dickens' work and her astonishing versatility as a performer.
The show elegantly combines character sketches, short readings, biographical material and mordant commentary. Margolyes portrays characters from Dickens' lesser known fiction as well as the classics, with selections made partly on biographical significance - some of Dickens' characters were based on people he knew in life - and partly at Margolyes' (often considerable) pleasure.
Margolyes enters as Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit, a sodden nurse who specialises in laying out corpses for burial. And it's soon clear that Margolyes has a special affinity for Dickens' grotesques, rendering his florid satires of human frailty with a full measure of hilarity, and a dash of poignancy when required.
Amazingly, her compelling vocal characterisations are matched in facial expression and physical gesture. She can contort her features into any kind of caricature. One memorable scene from Oliver Twist, when Mr Bumble proposes to his paramour, sees Margolyes switch from wide-lipped lust to squinting coquettishness at lightning speed.
But it isn't just the comedy that makes Dickens' Women worth seeing. There are staggering dramatic portraits. As the lesbian Miss Wade from Little Dorrit, Margolyes aches with tormented love and barely controlled regret. As Miss Flight, the ageing spinster from Bleak House, she transforms from a slightly potty old duck into a softly spoken Cassandra, as she recounts the increasingly unpleasant names of her birds.
Dickens' Women is a tour de force. When she appears as herself, Margolyes sparkles with intelligence and enthusiasm and is full of witty erudition about Dickens' life and work. And when she inhabits his characters, you'd swear they lived and breathed in front of you.
Review
By Chris Boyd, HERALD SUN
DICKENS' WOMEN
Where: Playhouse, Thursday. Also Frankston Arts Centre, October 9-10
CHARLES Dickens wrote two kinds of women: the innocent and the grotesque. Bland young angels and creepy, painted, psychotic, blowzy harridans.
The innocents, pretty much, are indistinguishable. They're all 17 and utterly nice. Dream girls. An old man's fantasy. The grotesques, by contrast, are unique. Each has a pathology all of her own.
There's no prize for guessing which are more fun to play, especially for a character actor of the calibre of Miriam Margolyes. They're also much more fun to watch.
So, first and foremost, Dickens's Women is a freak show. It strings together scenes from various novels: monologues, little dramas and a couple of self-contained readings from a lectern, a replica of Dickens' own . . . which he designed himself.
As much as Margolyes loves Dickens' novels, she's the first to admit his ingenues are a little bit ``icky'' and that the man was a misogynist pig.
He once likened his wife to a donkey before cruelly dumping her for a woman almost 30 years younger than himself.
In the course of two hours, Margolyes neatly sketches his life story and places him on the analyst's couch. Tales from his life are then illustrated by the scenes that those events inspired in his novels.
It's all immense fun, even if you're unfamiliar with the novels. There's an earthiness and a cleverness that feeds into Margolyes's acting.
She can pull faces and pull off dozens of voices, but there's so much more to her and her work. There's a creative spirit, a restlessness which helps keep a well-drilled work fresh and utterly live.
How lucky we are this extraordinary actor now calls Australia home.
Stage chameleon
By Catherine Lambert, SUNDAY HERALD NEWS
MIRIAM Margolyes is one of those rare modern actors because she is a genuine chameleon.
Effortlessly hopping between the characters in Charles Dickens' writings -- mostly women -- she is an actor of great agility.
She always manages to leave a strong impact in whatever medium and in whatever sized role because of her superb grasp of nuance. It all begins with the voice and she is definitely the mistress of her instrument, gliding into myriad personalities.
Although Margolyes may be best known for her comic sense and endearing cuteness, she can also draw a tear. She is moving, indeed quite haunting, as Miss Havisham and declaring Miss Flite from Bleak House as Dickens' most tender portrait, she plays her full compassion and sensitivity.
But she is equally sensitive with the funnier portraits, celebrating the human condition with a Dickensian relish. She declares that she loves playing the fireside scene from Oliver Twist, switching from lecherous Mr Bumble to opportunistic Mrs Corney with building enthusiasm.
Her life-long love of literature and Charles Dickens is evident in her acting. She appreciates the words and carries them a step further into the visual world so vividly created by Dickens.
Aside from bringing the characters to life on stage, she also gives us a sense of Dickens as a complex and flawed man who, in knowing cruelty knew how to inflict it, particularly towards his wife, Catherine Hogarth, the mother to his 12 children.
This is theatre at its most enriching. It may not be a light and sound show, though John Martin plays wonderfully discreet mood piano, but it is theatre of words and imagination which is really at the heart of all great performance.
In the footsteps of Dickens: my American odyssey
By Miriam Margolyes, THE TIMES
America, the ‘republic of the imagination’, left Charles Dickens disillusioned and disgusted.
Charles Dickens captured my heart and colonised my imagination when I read Oliver Twist at the age of 11. Since that first encounter, I have wanted to explore every particle of him
For most people, Dickens is about England, and especially London. They may have heard about his triumphant American lecture tour in 1867-68. But nobody seems to know that he went to America first in 1842 as a young man — 29 when he landed in Boston — nor have they read the travel book he wrote on what he found there, American Notes.
He went as a tourist, with his wife Catherine, full of fascination for the new country, which he thought was going to answer a lot of questions about England and the way we run things here. He believed it would show the way forward, that America would provide a blueprint for democracy.
As it turned out, what Dickens found was something very different. Although he was fêted everywhere he went, at public balls and private dinners, he grew increasingly disenchanted with what he saw. Within a few weeks, his early hopes that he might discover “the republic of my imagination” had darkened into a passionate condemnation of many of the worst elements of American society. His particular loathings were spitting, the abuse of copyright and, most passionately, slavery.
How relevant is his portrait of a nation today? Together with a BBC documentary crew, I retraced the writer’s footsteps, travelling, as he did, by river, road and rail, from summer on the East Coast as far south as Richmond, Virginia; then 1,000 miles west to St Louis, Missouri; and north to the New England autumn and the Canadian winter, finishing in Montreal.
We visited the same places as Dickens. And we asked ourselves and the people we met along the way, from paddle steamer captains on the Mississippi to the man with the largest organ in the world (I’m afraid I couldn’t resist — it’s in a department store in Philadelphia), whether Dickens’s 19th-century portrait of the United States is just a forgotten Victorian curiosity? Does he have something to tell us today about 21st-century America?
Certainly his criticism of the country echoes the hostility felt by many towards Bush’s regime today. In a journal entry, dated Sunday February 27, 1842, he wrote: “I do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be dealt by this Country — in the failure of its example to the earth.” He also wrote: “Americans can’t bear to be told of their faults” — that’s still the case.
We spent four months on the road; Dickens spent six. He was most inspired by the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. He devoted 35 pages of American Notes to it — one of the things that moved him most was watching the sighted child of one of the teachers playing with all the blind children. I wept as he did, to see the courage and energy of the pupils there.
I had very different feelings visiting Cairo, Illinois, the model for Eden in Martin Chuzzlewit. It still is, as Dickens wrote, “a dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away . . . a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it”.
Cairo remains a miserable place: it was the last town to be desegregated in the 1970s and racism still lingers in the air. At the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, it should be a prosperous boomtown, but it isn’t. It’s a ghost town. (Dickens despised the Mississippi — “a slimy monster hideous to behold”.)
However, the places I didn’t like on my trip — I found Richmond, Virginia, terribly twee in the way that Southern cities are — were far outnumbered by the destinations I enjoyed: Louisville, where Muhammad Ali lives; the Kentucky races, where I bought myself a Stetson. I found Philadelphia delightful, and not just because it is the only city in the world to have a life-size statue of Dickens. It enjoys all the cultural excitement of New York without the hysteria. Even the rather peculiar Pickwick Club, whose all-male membership celebrate Dickens by getting very drunk and delivering speeches in period argot, had a quirky charm. They made me an honorary member.
Dickens was a passionate idealist. He was convinced that he was going to find a different kind of humanity in the US. It was an absurd expectation and he left America disappointed, disillusioned and, in some ways, disgusted.
It changed him as a man because he became an adult there. He realised that political ideas alone are not enough to reform the world and improve life. Politics can never be perfect, only by changing the human spirit can our lives be made better. And it changed him into a serious artist — it sharpened his sense of morality. Now he had a purpose. He became a moral commentator as well as an entertainer.
Journeying in tandem with Dickens, I often agreed with him. He found the American character somewhat crude — well, sometimes they are. He noted the importance of religion. There are many Americas, but two in particular stand out; the one in which people go to church and the other where they don’t. I have never been more scared of God and of those who speak in His name.
Dickens left America almost wholly disillusioned. In March 1842, two and a half months into his trip, he wrote: “I am disappointed. This is not the republic I came to see, this is not the republic of my imagination. I infinitely prefer a liberal monarchy, even with its sickening accompaniments of court circulars to such a government than this. And England, even England, bad and faulty as the old land is, and miserable as millions of her people are, rises in the comparison. I would not condemn you to a year’s residence on this side of the Atlantic for any money.”
Dickens is too harsh. My journey turned into the best job I’ve ever had. I’ve been enchanted, surprised, disgusted, amused, excited and I have been changed. I learnt that you cannot write people off because they are Republicans or Christians or fundamentalists or smokers. My judgments have been too glib: I shall be more circumspect in future.
Dickens expected more than any country could deliver; but there are many Americas and great goodness to be found. Dickens was not blind to this; despite his negativity, he acknowledged America’s many faces. “How should I paint an American eagle?” Mark Tapley asks Martin Chuzzlewit, as they begin their voyage home. Simply painting an eagle would not do. “I should want to draw it like a Bat, for its short-sightedness; like a Bantam, for its bragging; like a Magpie, for its honesty; like a Peacock, for its vanity; like an Ostrich, for its putting its head in the mud, and thinking nobody sees it . . .”; and, Martin finishes, “like a Phoenix for its power of springing up from the ashes of its faults and vices and soaring up anew into the sky.”
PRESS LINKS
Australian Financial Review
The Stage Online
SOLT
Broadway World (West End)
Indie London
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