#THE TESTAMENT OF MARY BROADWAY PLAY SERIES#
Early on she tells us that memory fills her body, and so enthralling is Shaw over the next ninety minutes, pouring forth a series of terrible images and recollections, that you fully believe these memories have taken hold of her. Shaw gives Tóibín’s words such depth and power, whether uttered quietly (‘You don’t manage without a considerable amount of care’, is how she matter-of-factly describes living from one day to the next), or hurled up to the heavens in an agonised cry (‘I am not one of his followers!’, she screams, brilliantly capturing the tension between Mary’s need to adhere to her own beliefs and her frustration that that meant a wedge was driven between her and her son). She moves effortlessly between raw and visceral, sanguine and practical, mocking and humorous (she does great impressions of Miriam and Mary Magdalene). It is a potent, brazen portrayal, based on textual truth and yet brilliant in its daring and bold in the questions it asks and forces us to ask in return.įiona Shaw is outstanding as Mary. Tóibín’s Mary is profoundly human she is an old woman who lives alone – it’s heartbreaking to hear her admit that she always leaves one chair empty, the one that belonged to her beloved, deceased husband – and a mother who had a difficult relationship with her son and must now live with the consequences. She painfully confides to us that, when she tried to speak to him, to warn him about the dangerous consequences of his behaviour, his disdainful response was ‘Woman, what have I to do with you?’ Tóibín skilfully uses the miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead to illustrate the troubling nature of these miracles (Mary describes her son’s actions as ‘mocking the very way things are done in the world’) while at the same time refraining from challenging that they took place. Parents and children often grow apart (the Bible does hint that this was the case between Mary and Jesus), and Lazarus’ story also provides Tóibín with an opportunity to illustrate this, as Mary despairs that Jesus has become ‘unfamiliar’, ‘formal’ and ‘grand’. Like many mothers Mary remembers being shocked by her son’s actions, though in her case it was the ‘high-flown talk of power and miracles’ surrounding him that really worried her. Yet now she bitterly regrets that she did nothing and berates herself (‘I should have paid more attention to who visited’) the burden of guilt weighing on her is palpable. Her son’s disciples were ‘a group of misfits’ whose earnestness bored her, and she admits that she couldn’t bear to be around her son when his friends were present. Not content with the controversy created merely by giving her a voice at all, Tóibín’s Mary is also bold and opinionated: put more than two men together, she says, and you get ‘foolishness and cruelty’. In this brave and electrifying monologue, which gives a powerful and original voice to a woman whom history has largely rendered mute, it is on her role as mother that Irish novelist and playwright Colm Tóibín concentrates.
Whatever image of Mary we might bring with us to this play – iconic, idealised, virginal, silent, obedient – and through whatever societal or religious prism we might have viewed her up to this point, she was after all a mother. She also talks the whole time, telling us the story of her son’s life without ever once uttering his name, pouring out her frustration, her anger, her guilt, her pain, her loneliness, her despair.
She rolls cigarettes, but never smokes them. She drinks alcohol straight from the bottle. Something in me will break if I say his name.
The Testament of Mary, Walter Kerr Theatre, Broadway, 30th March 2013 Home › Theatre › The Testament of Mary, Walter Kerr Theatre, Broadway, 30th March 2013
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