6th July 2025 7:30pm
Emul8 Theatre Present:
HAVISHAM
Adapted and performed by Heather Alexander
Direction & Dramaturg by Dominique Gerrard
‘Powerful, tense, heart-breaking.’
This is the story that Dickens left out….
Like a Victorian freak-show attraction, Miss Havisham never fails to ghoulishly intrigue. After watching David Lean’s 1946 film ‘Great Expectations’ as a small child, I was, like many others, transfixed by Charles Dickens indomitable monstrous female creation. This led to a fascination with the depiction of female characters who have been labelled as mad, bad, or deranged.
With HAVISHAM, I wanted to explore how this woman could become stuck in a loop, in the terms of contemporary psychology, of unresolved trauma. I wanted to know what had occurred during her life that she was so full of proverbial rage. Dickens provides few details – we know that she was cruelly jilted on the morning of her wedding, and we know that she manipulated Pip to fall for a cruel-hearted Estella. But this wasn’t enough. I wanted to recognise who the human being was behind the figure forever frozen in our imaginations with the decaying remnants of her wedding feast. I wondered what chain of cumulative traumas had finally broken the back of her sanity.
In an era when women had few rights and virtually no power, Mis Havisham - one could argue - at least exists on her own terms. But in being labelled bitter and vengeful her character is conveniently pigeonholed into what we would now recognise as the stereotypical anti-feminist stance of the Angry Woman? Miss Havisham – the quintessential spinster – a woman with no first name – the unacceptable face of femininity.
Using contemporary parlance, Miss Havisham is the product of abuse, coercive control and gaslighting; terms we increasingly hear bandied about in the media. This led me to ask whether Miss Havisham was an unfortunate societal product of her time or were her woes and revenge tactics timeless?
In creatively reframing her story, I seek to restore Miss Havisham’s humanity and open a dialogue around compassion. In deconstructing hostile stereotypical attitudes towards women past and present, my artistic intention is to raise awareness of our collective human frailty and champion the need for empathy in an increasingly ruthless and competitive narcissistic society. Heather Alexander 2023
‘If you knew my story, your heart would break too. A cobwebbed tale of heartbreak’