MIRIAM MARGOLYES in DICKENS' WOMEN

Following acclaimed performances in 2007, award-winning British actress Miriam Margolyes returns to Australia for an encore national tour of her one-woman show, Dickens' Women.

Bringing to life twenty-three of Charles Dickens' most affecting and colourful characters, Margolyes presents her powerful, comprehensive, and at times hilarious exposé of Dickens the man, the writer, and the real-life women who found themselves immortalised on his pages.

Don't miss your chance to see this acclaimed actor in her charming dedication to one of history's most prolific and loved authors.

... a genuine chameleon. SUNDAY HERALD SUN
Immense fun... THE AUSTRALIAN

COST Adult $89.00, Concession $84.00, Groups +10 $79.00

New prices released:
Adult  $69.00 and  Concession & Children $64.00

Click here to read the Melbourne Season Review

Dickens' Women has serious claims to being the best one-woman show you'll ever see THE AGE

The light and dark sides of Dickens
BY: JOHN MCCALLUM
From: The Australian
February 09, 2012 12:00AM

THE marvellous Miriam Margolyes is back with a show she first toured to Australia in 2007, this time to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens's birth. It is still an astonishing tour de force.

It is a great pleasure to watch and listen to her characterisations of favourite Dickens characters but what gives this show its appeal is the narrative that weaves the pieces together and the delight Margolyes takes in the material. Her face beams, her eyes shine, she almost wriggles with excitement after each segment.

"I love doing that!" she says after playing both characters in the courtship between Mrs Corney and Mr Bumble from Oliver Twist. "Sexual greed and economic greed in the same scene!" Her enthusiasm is infectious.

Her narrative of Dickens's life, the women in it and how they became characters in his novels is much more than a linking device. She clearly admires enormously the man's genius but is troubled by many of his attitudes and a lot of his behaviour. She develops a theme around his obsession with sweet 17-year-old girls, originating, she suggests, in his lifelong grief for his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, who died at that age, and in his first love, Maria Beadnell, who rejected him.
"He never got over it. As a matter of fact, Dickens never got over anything that ever happened to him," she says.

There is a dark section in the second half when she tells the story of his appalling treatment of his long-suffering wife, Catherine, after he fell in love at the age of 45 with actress Ellen Ternan, who was 17. In this disturbing story, told with a lot of wry humour, the extracts from Dickens sit like plums in a pudding.

She opens with a splendid rendition of the sodden Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit. Her Mrs Micawber is sweet and sad. She does a lovely performance of the dwarf manicurist Miss Mowcher from David Copperfield and a suddenly very moving one as the lesbian Miss Wade from Little Dorrit.

But the climax has to be, of course, the best known female character Dickens created: Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, sitting in her room in her decaying bridal gown, enticing Pip with her artistic creation, the lovely Estella, whom she has raised to be loved by men and to hurt them in order to wreak vengeance for her abandonment.

This is a magnificent scene, read simply from a replica of Dickens's own lectern, drawing together all the threads of Margolyes's and Sonia Fraser's script. "Some people say Estella was Ellen Ternan," Margolyes says. "I think Miss Havisham was Dickens himself."