Award Winning performer and writer (Best Female Actor) HEATHER ALEXANDER, takes us on a roller coaster journey of emotions with her latest show, BECOMING MAVERICK Directed by Tina Pelini. This is the world premiere of the work.
The play is inspired by the character of Mrs Danvers from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca – a wholly imagined creative origin story and a stunning French poem whose passion captured Alexander on hearing it. Having interviewed her last week I had an interesting insight into the show and also how Heather works.
This is a dark piece but entrancing with moments of humour and coquettishness.
The play is a mix of rhyming couplets and prose. The language is rich and eloquent.
I like The Actors as a venue – always a welcoming space for any production.
We start with a figure sat at the front of the stage – low lit in blue from below – clutching a soft toy and clearly in fear.
A voice, clearly from a court room case, informs us of a woman being found dead in a trunk in France and a child abandoned by her mother, Renee Vivienne, nearby and it is the child’s story that we are given here by Alexander.
Terrified but with remarkable resilience the child, whose name is revealed to be Danvers, survives an abusive life in Plymouth Orphanage where she finds love with another child Jug. Ultimately after Jug’s death she makes her escape into the streets of London.
She learnt a maxim from her grandmother “As a child you do as you’re told, as a woman you do as you must” and lives by that determined to “stay alive”.
She sets off a fire alarm in Selfridges where she steals clothing and transforms herself from child to woman. From there she finds, in a house in Fitzroy Square, a position as a tutor to a young 11 year old girl Rebecca who is as wild and wilful as herself. They form an alliance, like sisters, and go on adventures in the city – getting into scrapes joyfully.
The father of the girl is one Sir Cain Hemsley, a violent abusive drunk who assaults the young Danvers and finally attempts to do the same to Rebecca leading to his murder at their hands although Hemsley’s, wayward, drunken and disturbed wife Sassy gets the blame.
They then discover through some found letters that not only was Hemsley Rebecca’s father but he fathered Danvers with Renee Vivienne.
The girls escape to the South West of England near Exeter where Danvers plans to find a good marriage for Rebecca and discovers a suitable target in Maxim De Winter in a house called Mandalay. We have filled in the back story for Mrs Danvers with delightful skill.
Becoming Maverick – the journey of a woman who learns to twist the knife of fate. But this isn’t the end. Her story is just beginning… with a secret that no-one can know.
Heather Alexander now takes the show to Hastings and Edinburgh but it surely needs to be seen more widely.
