Great Expectation's creepily tragic Miss Havisham has become an iconic figure.
Portrayed in film and television (always it seems by stars secure in their beauty), her name has become a shortcut to express ugly monstrousness, a ghoulish carapace enclosing a sinister breeding ground for cruel and premeditated avengement.
So strong are those images of a woman with matted hair and cobwebbed clothes for whom time has stopped that it is easy to accept her character without enquiry. She just is.
Heather Alexander has taken the less easy route and penetrated the grotesque exterior to write her a more fully-formed backstory, one which Alexander delivers in a compelling performance at Jack Studio Theatre.
She has imagined for Miss Havisham a motherless childhood suffering the contempt of household servants who barely raise her and the neglect of a drunken father. With no one looking out for her, she is vulnerable to the harsh attentions of the Church and later of men who see her for less than she is.
As a young woman of 17, she is sent from this isolated and miserable existence in the Kent countryside to London to live with an aunt who sets her up and then leaves her to her own devices in the city, unguarded again.
Here there is flesh around the bones of her courtship by Compeyson; the unheeded signs of his malign coercion and the happiness she experiences are well set up by Alexander to magnify the anguish of her betrayal.
This intricately crafted play does more than fill in holes in Miss Havisham's biography. Alexander draws together a set of credible formative experiences, woven through with themes from the story of Medusa (punished by Athena for being raped by Poseidon in Athena's temple), that mirror the youthful Havisham sustaining injustice after injustice.
She emerges, not as the wealthy young heiress who crumbles after being jilted on her wedding day, but a whole human person whose capacity to endure further adversity has reached saturation point.
As a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, I found Great Expectations deadly dull, and no number of elegant costume drama adaptations have made Miss Havisham anything other than a grand dame of English literature, up there with Jane Austen's Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
Heather Alexander's play is an invitation to look at Miss Havisham differently, if not with compassion at least with some understanding. When she behaves so callously to Pip and Estella, she employs the only skills she has learnt from the adults who surrounded her. It's a salutary thought.