Margolyes & Dickens: Miriam’s filthy one-woman show leaves you wanting more Dickens, less of her

The actress deftly shape-shifts between Dickens’s characters in this homage to the author – but spends too long sharing her own anecdotes

Miriam Margolyes and Charles Dickens go together like butter and crumpets, or humbug and politicians. With her distinctive presence and larger-than-life personality, Margolyes, 83, might have stepped from his novels, albeit she’s so unguarded she’d have been banished from polite Victorian society.
Margolyes & Dickens: The Best Bits – a one-hour, one-woman homage that’s packing out the vast conference-hall theatre at the EICC – continues a love affair with the man she calls the “greatest writer England ever produced”. As well as appearing (as the garrulous Flora Finching) in the 1987 film of Little Dorrit, she has appeared in her own solo showcase of ‘Dickens’ women’ and written a related book.
Those expecting a lifetime’s distilled passion, though, need to be warned: what begins as a succession of nicely rendered excerpts that play to her expressive vocal strengths turns into a Q&A that foregrounds this notorious loose cannon’s entertaining weakness for firing off in all directions, offering up the spectacle of her incorrigible eccentricity.
It seems apt that dominating the velvet-curtained scene is a blow-up image of the actress on one side, hands reverentially clasped, and the author on the other, caught in a pose of weary, critical bemusement. Without much preamble she settles into a chair, feigns snoring sleep and rouses herself as the sozzled nurse Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit, complete with erratic cockney emphasis.
Though she has a script to hand, she has this pretty much off pat and mildly shape-shifts with alacrity and accuracy: by turns Fagin greeting Oliver with a lightly predatory air, then acidic, wretched Miss Havisham – at that first taunting encounter with Pip – and the boarding-house keeper Mrs Pipchin, greeting young Paul Dombey, (whose trembling treble she also imitates) as he sits, looking down “as if he had taken life unfurnished and the upholsterer was never coming”.
“What a great line that is,” offers our guide, and, a few contextual prefaces aside, that’s about the level of her imparted insight. “Dickens hated ‘fat’, he’d have hated me,” she says, in succinct conclusion, a propos the vexed topic of his relations with women. Given the pin-sharp renditions, which also take in Flora F, the transformed Scrooge, and, from Twist again, the courtship between Mr Bumble and Mrs Corney, you can’t grumble, though, like Oliver, you’re left wanting more.
In terms of anecdotage, however, spurred by written audience questions, there’s no deficit, including a jaw-dropping account of a long-ago nocturnal encounter with two sexually needy men after the Edinburgh Tattoo, and her disdain for Terry Scott (“a nasty little groper”) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (who she claims farted in her face during a film-shoot). It’s like an unfiltered cross between Radio 4’s Any Questions and Just a Minute as she discourses on orgasms one minute, her pro-Palestinian position the next. “Anyone who wants a wee-wee please feel free to go because I know what it’s like to piss yourself,” she says. If Dickens is short-changed, boy do you get your money’s-worth of Miriam.
Until Aug 15. Tickets: edfringe.com; miriammargolyes.com