“Look on what remains of me,” she quietly directs the boy, the wedding dress she was left at the altar in now grey from decades of obsessive wear, while her features suggest a venomous psychological fissure. But he’s not, merely because at the end of the episode we meet wealthy, reclusive spinster Miss Havisham, who is genuinely terrifying because she’s played by Olivia Colman. When local schoolboy Pip (Tom Sweet) first encounters him by night, Magwitch is meant to be a terrifying sight.
“I am a volcano”, he howls, vowing vengeance even as he faces transportation to Australia. Throughout the first episode of this iconoclastic Charles Dickens adaptation, a desperate 19th-century convict named Magwitch (Johnny Harris), rages at every turn.
Olivia Colman tells you everything you need to know about Miss Havisham in just a few minutes of Steven Knight’s Great Expectations.
