DAILY MAIL - Reviewed by Patrick Marmion 17th August 2012
There's no Simon Callow doing Dickens this year. No Simon Callow doing Shakespeare. Not even Simon Callow doing Simon Callow.
Instead, it falls to Miriam Margolyes to plug the celebrity recital slot. And how she rises to the occasion.
The 71-year-old actress brings a host of characters to life, vividly connecting Mrs Micawber in David Copperfield with Dickens’s mother, and the forbidding Mrs Pipchin in Dombey And Son with his childhood guardian.
Her piece de resistance is a vignette featuring Mr Bumble and the matron in Oliver Twist — a mixture, she says, of sexual and economic greed.
Margolyes is not uncritical of Dickens. She reminds us that he could be a male chauvinist pig, as when dismissing his faithful wife and mother of his ten children as a ‘donkey’.
But she gives a hugely energetic and endearing performance, which speaks volumes for her affection if not for Dickens himself, then for the worlds in his novels.
Posted : 17th August 2012