Review: ESTELLA, Trinity Theatre, Tunbridge Wells

Charles Dickens' novels are filled to the brim with characters who capture different elements of the human condition - evil and good and, crucially, plenty in-between. Perhaps the most fascinating of them all - at least she was to me when first I read Great Expectations in my mid-20s - is Estella, Pip's paramour who isn't, Miss Havisham's instrument of revenge on men and the high maintenance, intelligent, beautiful woman a certain kind of man is always going to fall for.

But adapter/director, Kate McGregor, turns the lens inwards from the male gaze (guilty as charged in my case) and investigates the psychology of Estella herself - she gives the anti-heroine her humanity, her justification, ultimately her triumph. It's about time really.

Three women tell the tale. Miss Havisham is still railing against the treatment she received at the hands of a man, but learning that the price she exacted as a consequence was too high. Molly, Estella's birth mother forced to give away her child and coerced into what would now be called modern slavery to escape the gallows. And Estella herself, whom we see as a child, as an adolescent, as a woman of the world and ultimately was an escapee, a kind of vindicated and happy Magwitch.

We also meet Pip, the egregious Drummle, the slimy Jaggers and one or two others, but this is the women's stories, and harder, less sentimental, more 21st century as a result, particularly in the light of recent judicial developments in the United States.

Though one could argue that Annabelle Brown's Miss Havisham, the wedding dress singed at the hem, is a little too close to a caricature of a caricature, Estella is her creature so we need that backstory underlining. Olivia Warren is tragic as Molly, but she also shines as a thuggish Drummle and as poor old Pip. Ruth Brotherton gets Estella's sourness just so, but provides exactly the right level of pathos when she realises what she has lost and then musters the will to instigate catharsis.

Maria Haïk Escudero provides music (each actor-musician plays an instrument as occasion demands) and Charlotte Cooke's otherwise simple set comes alive when Estella uses fire as her means to avoid crashing and burning.

The foregrounding of support characters in classics, giving agency back to women specifically, is an interesting sub-genre of theatre that can only grow. The backroom conversations between Emilia and Desdemona made for the splendid Desdemona: A Play About A Handkerchief and listening in on the doomed children of Medea also made for another superb coup-de-theatre. There's something of those plays in this production, focused on Estella, whose great (financial) expectations were never in doubt, only whether she could survive the appalling (emotional) cost at which they came. It's good to have her back.

Estella completes its national tour at Thorington Theatre on 23 July

Photo: Theatre 6

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