First performed in 2007, Miriam Margolyes’s one-woman show focusing on the women in Charles Dickens’s life and fiction gets revived for the great author’s bicentennial year. And what a treat it is. Over two hours, Margolyes shows the breadth of her expansive character-actress repertoire, and also some of the highlights and more troubling aspects of Dickens’s female characters. For instance, we find out that Dickens was fixated with young women of 17; Margolyes suggests this obsession originated with the death at that age of Dickens’s sister. We also explore some of Dickens’s most vivid characters; from the inevitable figure of Miss Havisham through to lesser-known figures in The Old Curiosity Shop. It’s a surprisingly poignant evening; surprising because Margolyes isn’t necessarily known for her pathos (she’s probably associated more with comic and exuberant roles). The second half of the evening, in particular, delivers some moving monologues and some surprise revelations — I was not aware that Dickens created a lesbian character in the form of Miss Wade from Little Dorritt; something that Margolyes highlights in a starkly lit, breathy, in-character monologue. But it’s also a show full of light, colour and comedy, and is, at times, gloriously irreverent. The show criticises Dickens as much as it praises him. His ill-treatment of his wife, Catherine, is particularly striking. As is his almost binary depiction of women in his fiction as either young innocents or gnarled grotesques. Although occasionally these moments are a little one note (Margolyes is exploring these issue from a defiantly modern standpoint, skirting over the Victorian context in which Dickens was writing), her light touch and comic timing keep the proceedings mostly away from tub-thumping piety.

So, all in all, Dickens’ Women is a resounding success; although it generally works better as a showcase for Margolyes’s outstanding acting range rather than Dickens’s work and life, there is plenty to learn here too. Harsh criticism would be churlish for this good-spirited, voraciously entertaining show.