The ‘Wit’ of Miriam Margolyes

Every August my wife and I go with our younger daughter, her husband and three children to the Edinburgh Festival. They go for the shows, we go for them. There are so many shows that, inevitably, some are good, some bad, some indifferent and some truly awful – performances that make you sorrier for the performers than yourself. It’s a lottery; and, for our daughter and son-in-law, that seems to be part of the fun. This year one of the shows we went to was Miriam Margolyes & Dickens: the Best Bits. It seemed a way to bypass the luck of the draw. Dickens, after all, is Dickens; and Miriam Margolyes is known to be a clever woman and a good actress. Moreover, when I was an Editor and Director of a now defunct publishers, The Brynmill Press, she was one of the few people who bought any of our books – which also predisposed me in her favour. And she’s Jewish, which I am racist enough to associate with expectations of wit and laughter. (There was, as it happens, a good deal of the latter, and not at her expense either.)

The promoters – like good promoters – called it a new show, but whom it was new to, goodness only knows. It couldn’t have been her. The Best Dickens bits, of which there weren’t many and which she must have done hundreds of times, were the most obvious and most familiar bits: Mrs Gamp, of course, Fagin, of course, Scrooge, of course, Flora Finching, of course. Then, to be watching from near the back of the Lennox Suite in the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (17,115 sq ft in area, 23 ft in height and, in its raked theatre set-up option, accommodating 2,000 delegates) meant that, as good as the view and the sound system were, you were hardly placed to appreciate anything going on on stage that might be called acting.

It wasn’t a good sign that she introduced Dickens as the greatest writer in the language. He is, without doubt, a very great writer – perhaps (except for the author of Anna Karenina?) the greatest novelist in the language. But he isn’t Shakespeare; and nobody who has any opinion worth listening to could possibly think he is. It was a worse sign that, having said we all knew who Dickens was, she added – as if spontaneously – “And, if you don’t know who I am, what the fuck are you doing here?” And it was a worse sign still that, at that, the whole audience laughed uproariously. Was this to be the signature note of the evening – fat old lady with posh voice says rude words and audience erupts into laughter? When we got to the second half (or, more like, two thirds) of the performance – Miriam Margolyes Without Dickens – it was.

It was worse. I don’t know whether she had contempt for her audience but she certainly knew it and how to please it, and without putting herself out. No doubt she’d had to work to get up her Dickens readings in the first place, but that must have been years ago. It couldn’t be costing her much to repeat them now, not with the text in front of her. In the second part of her show she answered audience questions – any questions. That ought to have been a tip-off for what was to come but, naively, I expected the questions to be about Dickens and her readings: Why do you think Dickens greater than Shakespeare? Or: Why did you choose those particular passages? You did Flora Finching as if she were just a figure of mockery, but is that all she is? Or, perhaps: Do you think Fagin and Scrooge anti-semitic? But the questions she answered had all been asked in advance, before anyone in the audience had heard her readings. She wasn’t naive and knew her audience wasn’t interested in Dickens. What it had come for was to see her exhibit – ’Er off the telly. So exhibit she would and did.

If she knew her audience, it no less knew her. It had seen her exhibit on the Graham Norton and other shows, and that was what it wanted more of, and that was what she gave it. (The contempt was mutual.) The first question prompted her to retell a story about drug smugglers making a drop at a house of hers on the Kent coast. It was a story worth telling but not to 2,000 people paying £25 a head, many of whom must have heard it before. To get laughs from it, she pretended (or perhaps it wasn’t a pretence) to treat it as an opportunity to advertise the house as a holiday let.

The second question was “What was your best orgasm?”, and from then on the whole point became an old, fat, lesbian saying “shit”, “fuck” and “crap” in a posh voice (while staying within the bounds of decency by not saying “prick”, “bum” or “cunt”) and chatting about masturbation and semen: OK when it’s inside you but very sticky if you get it on your hands from masturbating a strange man on the way back to your digs after doing a late night gig at the Edinburgh Festival.

An essential part of her schtick seemed to be a consciousness that she had never been attractive to men. And this gave a queer divided sense to a performance which, once the readings were over, didn’t consist of someone doing something (like Sleary at the circus in Hard Times “throwing seventy-five hundred-weight in rapid succession backhanded over his head, thus forming a fountain of solid iron in mid-air, a feat never before attempted in this or any other country”), but of someone just making an exhibition of herself. How to see it? Was it a kind of revenge on an audience made up almost wholly of people who, unlike herself, had paired off and mated, or was it a brave attempt to face up to and make something of a fate that most of them would likely find bleak? It couldn’t have been, could it, just professional?

Then a question commanded her to rehearse her political opinions so the audience could applaud them. She rehearsed; her audience applauded. The name Rees-Mogg was a button that had only to be pressed to get the applause of a good joke well told. The name Netanyahu was another – though not either told or applauded as a joke. That she, a Jew, was denouncing the leader of the Jewish state exhibited her seriously concerned side, and that her audience applauded exhibited its, to the satisfaction of both.

But then occurred the one genuinely entertaining moment in the whole performance, and one which, in a way, justified the £50,000 or so the audience had paid for it. Four people, in the middle of a row near the back, all fair-haired, fair-skinned and snub-nosed, rose and awkwardly made their way out. At which Ms. Margolyes told the audience not to mind them. They were leaving because they were Jewish and didn’t want to hear Israel being criticised. To which one of the four responded, unheard, “Not Jewish, Bored.”

Duke Maskell writes Reactionary Essays at dukemaskell.substack.com.