Writer: Heather Alexander
Director: Tina Pelini
Heather Alexander’s tightly penned and brilliantly performed single-hander, Havisham, offered up a Victorian version of the Medusa myth (or at least the Medusa myth as reclaimed by feminist writers) as backstory to elucidate the plight of the mad old lady from Great Expectations. In her splendidly enjoyable gothic tale Becoming Mrs Danvers, we get a reimagining of the childhood and coming-of-age of Mrs Danvers, the chillingly malign antagonist from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Anticipate an immaculately camouflaged late twist in the tale that confounds expectations and suggests there is more than one string to Alexander’s fill-in-the-backstory bow.
Setting aside the question as to whether either character really needs more history than their authors give them, it is easy to see similarities between the two. Miss Havisham and Mrs Danvers are cut from the same compellingly gloomy cloth: each frozen in time, refusing to let the present intrude, living ghosts inhabiting glum country piles. Both characters succumb to fiery deaths. Yet while Alexander’s Havisham ended up sympathetically, a batty old lady enjoying life entirely on her own terms, her Mrs Danvers is positively psychopathic. Think Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde wrapped up in a midnight blue silk dress and a neatly starched collar.
Danny has locked herself in her cluttered, graffiti-strewn room in a mental hospital. She is making furious notes for a memoir. A Hitchcock film plays on her laptop in the background. A selection of black-and-white movie-star photos, perhaps Clara Bow or Gloria Swanson (there is certainly a hint of Sunset Boulevard here), hang from the wall. “Take your pills, Danny”, shouts an American nurse from the other side of the door, “you know what happens if you abuse the rules”. The ‘madwoman in the attic’ trope is laid on with a veritable shovel.
Danny’s slow-reveal backstory takes us from the death of her mother in 1919 to a nightmare childhood in a Plymouth children’s home, a setting that naturally gives rise to the line “Last night I dreamt I went to the orphanage again”. Abused and hectored by the malicious nuns who run the place, she finds succour in the friendship of a stammering buddy, Judith, and a sock puppet, Marmalade, and emotional safety in occasional visits to silent movies. “You must face the wolf,” she tells herself, echoing distant memories of a half-forgotten grandmother. She scrubs floors while blood runs from her hands.
At 16, Danny escapes from the orphanage and finds herself in London, stealing clothes from Selfridges and imagining herself wealthy and famous. Plot shenanigans see her pitch up to interview for the job of nanny and French teacher to the foul-mouthed, feral Rebecca, 12-year-old daughter of a louche Fitzroy Square aristocrat. “This is my only chance,” muses Danny, and she grabs it (and as many of the household valuables as she can sequester) firmly by the ears. Quite how the teenager managed to learn impeccable French at an orphanage in Plymouth is never explained, but hints throughout the immensely watchable 85-minute piece suggest she may not be an entirely reliable narrator.
Plain Danny judges Rebecca “the most beautiful human I ever saw”, and the tutor and ward soon strike up a close bond of the ‘partners in crime’ variety. I am “your foil, your shadow, your husk”, the elder girl tells the younger, though as the years go by, it is the thieving, amoral Danny who gets the upper hand.
Tina Pelini’s direction is a little too busy and occasionally over-literal: there are only so many ways one can shuffle a suitcase around a stage and mime keeping silent. But the show’s haunting, evocative sound design makes up for directorial over-enthusiasm, and Alexander’s turn as the Machiavellian, villainously gothic Danny is stonkingly good. You will not see the ending coming, though it is hiding in plain sight throughout.
Reviewed on 22 February 2026
