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Culture Stage

What the Dickens

GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Charles Dickens, adapted and directed by Michael Shamata, with Jeff Lillico, Kate Trotter, Leah Doz, Deborah Drakeford and Oliver Dennis. Presented by Soulpepper at the Young Centre (50 Tank House Lane). Previews begin Saturday (July 6), opens July 16 and runs in rep to August 17. $51-$68, some discounts and rush tickets. 416-866-8666, soulpepper.ca.


Charles Dickens was one of the world’s best storytellers, and Soulpepper appreciates his skill.

Since the company’s early days, they’ve regularly staged Michael Shamata’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and last year’s Word Festival was dedicated to Dickens and his works.

Now they offer Great Expectations, adapted by director Shamata from the lengthy novel following the fortunes of Pip, a poor orphan who rises in society with the help of an unknown benefactor and learns, along the way, the importance of love, family and forgiveness.

One of the central plot lines involves the reclusive Miss Havisham, abandoned on her wedding day years before the action begins, and Estella, a beauty raised by the older woman to exact her revenge on men.

“I’d never read the book before I started preparing for the role of Estella,” admits Leah Doz, who makes her debut with Soulpepper this season. “It’s gorgeously written, with characters you imagine must have existed in real life because of the way they come alive on the page. Dickens is wonderfully detailed in his description of people and their idiosyncrasies.”

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Not all of a 450-page novel can be included in a two-hour play, says Doz, but Shamata has captured the epic inner and outer journey Pip undergoes as he learns to care about others and forgive himself and them.

In giving an inner life to Estella, Doz has discovered reasons to feel sympathy for a figure who can easily appear as simply a pitiless seducer.

“Like Pip, she thinks of herself as an orphan, primed by her adopted mother, Miss Havisham, to lure men and break their hearts. She’s been raised to be cruel to others and has never learned to love, which is just Miss Havisham’s intention.”

What the older woman doesn’t realize, though, is that Estella has been too perfect a student.

“She’s not just heartless to men, but also to her ‘parent,'” says Doz, who appeared earlier this year in Soulpepper’s Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead and La Ronde. “Along the way, Estella has also developed an incredible amount of self-loathing and disgust she believes she’s unworthy of anything good in life.”

Still, there’s a sense of human kindness in her actions toward Pip, who’s infatuated with her from the moment he first meets her when they’re both children. When they’re adults, she constantly warns him away, knowing she can never give him the love he deserves.

“The audience has to see that struggle she feels, and her late realization that the only reason she can survive is because someone thinks her worthy of affection.”

The actor admires the perceptive psychology Dickens brings to his characters. In the case of Miss Havisham and Estella, it’s the way parents’ insecurities are passed on to and lived out by their children.

“Some commentators see Estella as the most realistic character Dickens ever created, but I think there’s complexity in all the story’s women, from Pip’s sister, the bitter Mrs. Joe, to the simple, big-hearted country girl, Biddy, and even the smaller role of Molly, housekeeper to the lawyer, Mr. Jaggers.

“They’re all multifaceted figures, which I think is rare for women onstage. You can argue that it’s Miss Havisham who sets the action in motion, even though this is a world ruled by men and she’s an isolated figure living in a dark mansion away from society.”

Additional Interview Clips

The production’s design:

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Estella’s growth over the course of the story:

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stage@nowtoronto.com

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