Miss Havisham's Expectations
performed by Linda Marlowe, written and directed by Di Sherlock
Miss ('Norma') Havisham tells us her version of the events described by 'Sir Dick' in 'Great Expectations', explaining her own views on betrayal, rage,vengeance, authorial pomposity, conjuring tricks and much else. There is in fact very little to add to the outline of her story, the main event still being the notorious jilt on her wedding day.
We are not privy to further details about the romance and its spectacular undoing, except in the most general terms - she loved wildly and not too well, against the advice of family and friends. But there are acerbic opinions about Dickens's own domestic arrangements, about the suitability of the sentiments so loftily expressed in Tennyson's 'In Memoriam', and about the choices available to Victorian women. Miss Havisham proves a dab hand at various conjuring tricks, as well as claiming the rather creepy ability to inhabit her protegee Estella, which allows her to do more than simply present us with an old lady dressed in the fabled tattered wedding gown. She baulks utterly at an attempt to 'inhabit' Pip, the unexpected gulf of gendered experience perhaps proving too much for her arts - but this is the beginning of some sort of recognition that there may be more to the human condition than her own self-involved obsessions.
Linda Marlowe commands the stage with great virtuosity, and the prospect of dealing for an hour with a monomaniacal and embittered old woman is rapidly dismissed as she displays a fine contempt for stereotypes and a sharp (and at times very modern) tongue in explaining her point of view. The sense of the grown-up Estella's cold distaste, or of Pip's finally appalled pity, is necessarily muted from her own perspective, though there is at the very last a hint that she is ready to let go of the monstrous obsession that has defined and ruined her life.
We see not the baffling and eccentric harridan of Pip's childhood encounters, nor merely the vicious and controlling force in Estella's life, nor even the somewhat melodramatic despair of her final appearance in the novel, but rather a more rounded and even at times amusing character with several surprises in store for us and a healthy disregard for 'Sir Dick's' woeful inability to understand women. Whether this actually enhances our view of Miss Havisham and her function in the novel 'Great Expectations' is a moot point.
Sikes and Nancy
by Charles Dickens, adapted and performed by James Swanton
This is an acted version of the explosive readings that Charles Dickens himself used to give of the climactic murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes from his novel 'Oliver Twist'. James Swanton has picked up the story at the point where Fagin sets a spy on Nancy to see whether she is about to betray him and his gang. The spy follows Nancy to London Bridge where she meets Mr Brownlow and Lucy but refuses their offer of aid to escape from her own situation. But Fagin 's version of the encounter when he tells it to Bill Sikes is tailored to his own ends, and shaped by his own fears, with the result that Bill returns to his house and murders Nancy. His reaction to the crime expresses itself in appalled revulsion and fevered hallucinations which eventually lead to his accidentally hanging himself while trying to escape from a mob baying for his death.
James Swanton inhabits his characters with uncanny acuity, so that his tall thin frame can be bent almost to a hunchbacked twistedness to depict Fagin, and can shrink to trembling fear and uncertainty as Nancy attempts to maintain loyalty and some sort of dignity in the face of the imposing Mr Brownlow's insistence on offering the false hope of charity. Moments later he becomes the thuggish and suspicious Sikes. But he also convinces utterly as the unmanned murderer thrashing out violently as the unfortunate Nancy expires, and then being persecuted in his own mind by the girl's spirit haunting him to death. He has an amazing facility with accents, posture, mood and dramatic tension, so that it is always clear what is happening and whom he is representing at any given time. He clearly relishes the ringing phrases Dickens uses to depict the passage of the fatal night, the great set pieces about November fog and darkness in the city as much as the telling strokes of characterisation.
The piece is very different in style and intention from 'Miss Havisham's Expectations', in that it is a performance of what Dickens actually wrote, rather than a response to it. The intoxicating power of Dickens's prose is seen to great advantage here, in contrast to the almost conversational style in which 'Norma' Havisham addresses us. One can well understand how Dickens himself became almost addicted to performing this piece, to the severe detriment of his own health, though one can also readily imagine that more than an hour of such high-pressure prose would tax even the most spellbound audience. This episode was timed exactly to deliver the strongest effect, and it was salutary that the text was taken from the novel itself rather from the inevitable condensations and reorderings of various cinematic adaptations.
