Theater Review : Margolyes’ ‘Dickens’ a Passionate Outing : Engagingly, British actress crisscrosses from the author’s biography into his work.

The UK/LA Festival continues, and unless it adds “Faye Dunaway Salutes the Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber,” I can’t imagine anything in the series more satisfying than Miriam Margolyes performing her one-woman show, “Dickens’ Women.”

Margolyes, a roly-poly British actress who portrayed Flora Finching in the film version of “Little Dorrit” and Mrs. Manson Mingott (Winona Ryder’s grandmother) in Martin Scorsese’s “Age of Innocence,” is a passionate reader and intelligent critic of the great man’s work. She would use “great,” however, only to describe Dickens’ artistic gifts. Her evaluation of his life, particularly his treatment of his wife, Catherine Hogarth, is less enthusiastic.

She is also a delightful actress with a terrific vocal range, which she uses to capture young boys, teen-age girls and a variety of silly and touching older women. Like the most engaging professor, she freely crisscrosses from the author’s biography into his work; her extrapolations make both his personal history and his characters astonishingly vivid.

Dickens lived with Catherine and her younger sister, Mary, and the author loved to go to the theater with a sister on each arm. He was in love with the 17-year-old Mary, whom he saw as an angel, a woman who “had not a single fault” (as only a very young woman with no claims on a man can have).

One night, after coming home from the theater, Mary was ascending the stairs in front of Dickens, and she fell back into his arms and died. She became the basis for many of his angelic heroines, all of them 17, such as Kate in “Nicholas Nickelby” and Ada Clare in “Bleak House.” They were “mini-breasted, pre-pubescent love objects,” and, the actress adds, “I find them icky” (she rolls her eyes to call attention to her rotund body) “for obvious reasons.” Margolyes sides with Oscar Wilde, who famously remarked, “One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”

Dickens never got over the death of Mary, but, as Margolyes points out, he never got over anything. The nadir of his childhood occurred when his mother sent him back to his miserable job as a worker in a shoe-blacking factory that he had momentarily escaped; it formed the basis for a gallery of loveless children he wrote about so heartbreakingly. Margolyes tells this story with great compassion for the boy, but her kind, open face clenches with fury when she shares Dickens’ description of his wife, who delivered 12 children in 16 years: “Catherine is as near being a donkey as one of her sex can be.”

Yet it is the older women, the “ones he didn’t want to sleep with” and who “teeter on the edge of grotesque,” who truly “erupt with life.” She performs a string of them, from Mrs. Gamp in “Martin Chuzzlewit” to Mrs. Micawber in “David Copperfield” to Flora Finching in “Little Dorrit” to her wonderful Miss Flite in “Bleak House.” As a piece de resistance she performs the major roles in “Great Expectations,” looking up from the podium with the wide eyes of Pip, down with the tired eyes of Mrs. Havisham and straight out with the arrogance of Estella.

Margolyes is a fan more than a critic. She says of Dickens: “If he hadn’t made me laugh so much he would have made me very angry.” With the help of Stuart Anderson’s dramatic lighting, she makes every scene riveting. Her passion is as much a subject of the evening as the author himself. Anyone who loves to read will recognize her devotion, her attention, and will be enchanted by her gift at transforming the pleasures of the text into the pleasures of the stage.

* “Dickens’ Women,” Freud Playhouse, UCLA Campus, tonight at 8, Sunday at 3 p.m. $25. (310) 825-2101. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

A UCLA Center for the Performing Arts, LA Theatre Works & UK/LA Foundation production. Written and performed by Miriam Margolyes. Directed by Sonia Fraser. Lighting by Andrew Leigh. Production coordinator Steve Lewis.