Theatre review: Miss Havisham’s Expectations, Gilded Balloon Teviot (Venue 14), Edinburgh

IN THE year of Charles Dickens’s bicentenary, there has been no shortage of work celebrating his extraordinary place in English literature; but I doubt if any of them has approached him with a more feisty and sceptical gaze than Di Sherlock’s 70-minute monologue, performed with terrific panache by the legendary Fringe actress Linda Marlowe.

Miss Havisham’s Expectations

Gilded Balloon Teviot (Venue 14)

Star rating; * * *

On a stage furnished only with a caricature of a wedding table, a ruined chair and a large oval mirror that sometimes becomes a screen, this Miss Havisham not only rages against the man who jilted her, and plots revenge on the entire male sex as represented by Dickens’s hero, Pip; she also – in deliberately anachronistic language – pours a great deal of scorn on her own male creator, who notoriously had his wife declared insane and exiled to the countryside so that he could pursue his relationship with a teenage mistress.

In the end, the play seems more like a fierce and witty footnote to Dickens’s novel than an original piece in its own right; but Marlowe’s performance is infinitely worth seeing: wild, disturbing and oddly sexy in its evocation of the wreckage of a woman who is angry beyond time, still in some lights beautiful and not quite dead yet.

• Until 27 August. Today 3pm.