Miriam Margolyes serves up a second helping of Dickens Women…
February 7th 2012 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Marked in England with a year- long celebration of the writer and his work, Perth audiences have an opportunity to engage with some of the writer’s most beloved female characters when Miriam Margolyes returns with her one-woman show Dickens Women.
Dickens Women brings together 23 characters gleaned from both Dickens’ life and the 2000 fictional characters that populated his novels – in the process articulating the often strong links between the two. Initially Dickens Women was a performed by Margolyes and David Timson for the 1989 Edinburgh festival, however the show was later rewritten for a tour to America, as Margolyes explains,
‘I was persuaded to make it into a one person show which I never thought I’d be able to do and I remember those rehearsals of alternate terror and delight. We finally we got it together and now I’m extremely proud of it. I suppose when I die I’ll be remembered more for Dickens Women than anything else’
Margolyes has had an immensely varied and stellar career. Her television, radio, film and theatre performances that include roles as diverse as the voices of the female characters on Monkey Magic; Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter movies; an upcoming role in the Phyrne Fisher Murder Mysteries series coming to ABC in February; a BAFTA winning performance in the Age of Innocence and yet it is Dickens’ Women that Margolyes believes will remain her enduring legacy as a serious actress.
Despite being over twenty years since she first started performing Dickens Women, including a sold out season in Perth in 2007, Margoyles is bubbling with enthusiasm with the prospect of bringing the show to audiences once more.
‘I’m absolutely relishing and enjoying doing it all over again and finding things that I have certainly said before, they’re in the text… but I hadn’t quite realised how wonderful they are.
‘I think it’s interesting for an actress to revisit roles, you know it’s kind of a stage, a process in my own personal journey through life and I’m going to be seventy-one in May so I won’t probably be doing this much more. I don’t mean that I’ll retire but I won’t be able to I don’t think… it’s physically very taxing and I think there will come a point I don’t know when, when I will have to stop doing the show so I think that focuses my mind very much so I feel that I’m saying farewell in a way to the characters I’ve loved so much for many years.
‘I’m touring America, England, New Zealand and Canada with Dickens Women – I’ve given up a whole year to it. I’m not going to make a lot of money, because you don’t make a lot of money in theatre, but I shall do what I should do which is take Dickens’ work to the people everywhere.
‘I’ve loved everything I’ve done I think, most people will tell you that, I do think that Dickens Women is important work and I’m not sure that all my work is important. But I think the work I’ve done on Dickens IS important, because it’s dealing with something that matters. Charles Dickens matters.’
Dickens Women is on the 30th and 31st March 2012 at His Majesty’s Theatre
Written by Zoe Carter
