HAVISHAM
Jack Studio Theatre
★★★
“The script is rich and lyrical although the elaborate metaphors occasionally lose their way”
We know Miss Havisham as the heartless manipulator of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. She is indelibly printed on our minds – dressed in cobwebs and a faded wedding gown, time frozen on the day she was jilted.
But how did she arrive at such an horrendous fate?
In her earnest solo production, writer and performer Heather Alexander aims to put paper-thin flesh on brittle bones, creating an origin story for the striking monster. She takes Miss Havisham from the misery of her childhood to the edge of love and fulfilment. The story that emerges is one of bitterness that accumulates over time like a hardening residue.
Under Dominique Gerrard’s formal direction, the busy set foretells of an eerie fate. It is dressed with bridal gowns and white veils, a clock ticking obtrusively but forever fixed at 20 minutes to nine.
Centre stage, there is a bed – or is it a coffin? Ghostly Miss Havisham rises from her slumber to tell a tale of a motherless girl, confused, unloved and fearful of God, death and her brutish father.
There is something of Norma “Sunset Boulevard” Desmond in Alexander’s feline physicality and phrasing: wide eyes, angular posing and an epic grandeur forever tumbling towards tantrum.
Her tragic isolation is underscored by her differences: rich amid the poor, girl among boys, a child with everything but nothing that matters. In a pivotal school room blunder she confuses Medusa for an angel and becomes in her own mind, a bad girl, a cursed girl, destined only to wound and harden hearts.
After a poor start in life, matters get worse, and the first act is a testing run of merciless catastrophes. The script is rich and lyrical although the elaborate metaphors occasionally lose their way. (Is “jumping into the box of life” really an image of freedom and exploration?)
After the rigours of the first act – where the tone is relentlessly morbid – Miss Havisham finally blossoms. She emerges in London a young woman capable of catching the eye of James, a dashing actor who appears loving and attentive if, er, unreliable.
Dotted about the story are reminders of the culmination – Satis House, a tragic girl named Stella, the ominous marshes hiding secrets in their billowing fog. We wonder if this Miss Havisham will grow sufficiently to match Dickens’ capacious version. We sit like engineers planning a trans-continental railway hoping the tracks from east and west will meet precisely.
The answer is: not quite, but only out by an inch or two.
Dickens’ Havisham is necessarily a gothic horror, a fully-formed, self-starting force of vengeance and malevolence. Alexander’s is a more modern interpretation: a woman as a reaction to her environment and trauma, a pitiful victim of men and their predations.
In an accomplished display, Heather Alexander fully embodies this icon of literature. It is a well-organised portrayal; perhaps not the baroque portrait it aspires to be but, instead, a chilling mosaic compiled from fragments and shards.
HAVISHAM
Jack Studio Theatre
Reviewed on 13th March 2025
by Giles Broadbent
Photography by Peter Mould
Previously reviewed at this venue:
IN THE SHADOW OF HER MAJESTY | ★★★★★ | November 2024
CAN’T WAIT TO LEAVE | ★★★½ | November 2024
MARCELLA’S MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT | ★★ | September 2024
DEPTFORD BABY | ★★★ | July 2024
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING | ★★★ | August 2022
RICHARD II | ★★★★★ | February 2022
HOLST: THE MUSIC IN THE SPHERES | ★★★★★ | January 2022
PAYNE: THE STARS ARE FIRE | ★★★ | January 2022
