Miriam Margolyes is ensconced in the garden room of a fancy Edinburgh hotel, framed by tasteful greenery and smiling for a fan who wants a selfie. Apple-cheeked and foul-mouthed, she is gracious with the passing stranger, though she warns me later: “If somebody pisses me off, I’ll say: ‘Now listen to me, I’m 84!’” She pauses. “But I don’t see why they should!” she adds with a laugh.
Margolyes is returning to Edinburgh for the second year running with an upgraded version of her acclaimed showcase based on the characters of Charles Dickens, her favourite author. “Same old cunt, even older,” reads the flyer. “It could be the last time, but don’t bank on it!”
The Edinburgh festival fringe is world-famous for the diversity of its acts, but industry and media attention is easily distracted and the appetite for bold new talent and fresh voices often equates – deliberately or otherwise – with youth. Yet this year offers a “brigade of old gits”, as the actor Andy Linden says, some of them veterans such as Margolyes who first performed there with Cambridge University Footlights in 1963, and others remarkably making their debuts in their 70s and 80s.
“I’m very lucky,” says Margolyes, whose legion of fans straddle generations and have delighted in her performances in Blackadder, Harry Potter and her appearances on The Graham Norton Show. “There’s relatively few people of my age still working.” And there is “nothing like a live audience”, she adds: “It’s like a kiss, it’s a caress.”
“I just enjoy doing it so much,” she continues, running through some of the characters she brings to the stage with “shape-shifting flair”, as one reviewer put it. “My favourites like Mrs Gamp, Miss Havisham, I think I’m a perfect person to give voice to these amazing creations of which there were very many. So it’s a bit of a wank, really,” she concludes cheerily.
Margolyes describes an “immediate feeling of joy and competence” when she steps out in front of an audience these days. Has she always felt as if she knows what she’s doing on stage? “No, it has come with time. What I am conscious of now is that people know who I am and that is really relatively recent.”
Just as confidence comes with age, so does a responsibility to use her profile to speak out on behalf of those who don’t have such a platform. Most recently Margolyes, who is Jewish, has faced a backlash for her strident criticism of the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza.
“People say: ‘You’re just an actor, for fuck’s sake, shut up.’ Well, that is a point of view. I don’t happen to share that. I think that if you have a chance to make an impact for good, to change things, then you should. I think it’s an absolute requirement, and people don’t, out of fear sometimes. They are afraid of being cancelled. You can’t cancel me!” she says.
Just off a flight from Australia, where she lives part-time with her partner, and suffering from “punishing” jet lag along with a recent back injury, Margolyes admits that life on the road can be tiring. “I’m gathering my powers and I will deliver, but it is a struggle.”
Also appearing at Edinburgh this year is Linden, a veteran character actor and one of Margolyes’s Harry Potter co-stars, who played the horcrux thief Mundungus Fletcher. This year marks the 40th anniversary of his Edinburgh debut in 1985. Now 71, when Linden last performed at the festival in 2022, he suffered a big respiratory attack and ended up in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.
Having been told by his doctor in no uncertain terms that “next time it happens I’d need a hearse not an ambulance”, Linden is embarking on his first booze- and cigarette-free festival as he returns with Baxter vs the Bookies, a show he wrote and performs himself, charting the fortunes of an ageing horse-racing tipster bamboozled by modern technology.
“In the past we gloriously defiled ourselves one way or another, but as the years unfold experience takes a hand,” he says with some forbearance. “Edinburgh is the Grand National, not a five-furlong sprint and whether you’re young or old you’ve got to pace yourself.”
Linden’s advice for performers of any age is to take a few days off during the run: “Edinburgh can be very insular so try to do something a little different, go up the coast. I go to the football and watch Hearts or Hibs. Don’t do 30 days nonstop.”
The festival has changed mightily in scale since he first performed here, and has become “fiercely competitive”. But ageism is not a concern for Linden: the “brigade of old gits” he is referring to includes Ivor Dembina, Stephen Frost, Mark Arden and Mark Thomas.
“You don’t retire from the profession,” he says, “the profession retires you.” And until that happens, he plans to start work in October on a new character project about a boxing cornerman.
Others are making their debut here. I come to the Assembly Rooms bar to meet two women who are sitting poised on high stools. Vivienne Powell, 76, has just emerged from the first performance of her solo show Diva, about an opera singer with dementia battling to reclaim her memories through music. Christine Thynne, 82, a retired physiotherapist who took her first dance class at 68, is embarking on the first full run of her choreographed performance These Mechanisms.
It’s a physically challenging dance piece involving scaffolding planks and stepladders. Does Thynne rub up against expectations of how a woman of her age ought to behave or what she is even capable of? She laughs. “At 82, people say: ‘You shouldn’t be going up a stepladder, somebody else should be changing the lightbulbs!’”
Powell adds: “Our society is pretty ageist, in a lot of ways. Older people can be quite dismissed for what they can contribute, particularly women. So, to be doing our own shows at the fringe at a more mature age is pretty amazing.”
Thynne concurs: “When you look back over the programmes of past years, I don’t know that there have been many elderly women who have done a full show.”
Yet the pair remain largely unfazed by their own trajectories. “It can be quite common with women”, Powell argues, “who don’t come into themselves until their 40s or 50s. And they discover talents, interests that they didn’t know they had. They start a whole new chapter of their lives.” Having worked as a teacher while raising her three children in Sydney, Australia, latterly as a single parent, Powell gave her first professional opera recital in her early 40s and later acted on stage, in TV and film in Los Angeles.
Do Powell and Thynne believe they are braver as performers because of their age and experience? “Definitely,” insists Powell. “You take more creative risks.”
“My piece is completely about creative risks,” agrees Thynne. “From the beginning where I’m lying on a scaffolding plank and turning over its width. That’s the essence of the creativity, because the audience wonder what is going to happen next, then they realise: this isn’t an elderly person, this is an exciting piece of work.”
There should be no age limit to creativity, says Powell. Her advice to those still contemplating their next chapter is straightforward: “Follow your heart, do what you love.” She raises one finger for emphasis: “And don’t settle.”
Thynne says: “Even if you’re bringing up children and juggling all these different things and the ups and downs of life, still follow your dream. And be very, very positive about that!”
Both women’s grandchildren will see their shows. Powell reads hers a George Eliot quote: “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”
Margolyes and Dickens: More Best Bits is at Pentland theatre at Pleasance at EICC until 24 August. Baxter vs the Bookies is at Gilded Balloon Patter House until 25 August. Diva is at Assembly Rooms, Drawing Room, until 24 August. These Mechanisms is at Dance Base until 20 August
