[title]
★★★
Tracy Letts’s 2018 play embraces and subverts bio-drama cliches. It’s the story of an alcoholic woman who lives a hard life, largely as a result of being the daughter of an alcoholic woman who also lived a hard life. Did Mary Page Marlowe ever have a chance?
What sets it apart is the way Letts has chosen to tell the story. Instead of a linear narrative, Mary Page Marlowe covers the eponymous midwestern Boomer’s entire life – from babyhood to near to the end – in 11 scenes that run in non-linear fashion, with plenty of her story wilfully omitted, or slyly deployed late on. Moreover, rather than a single big central role, the title part is performed by five actors (six if you count a dummy of a baby), the abiding effect of which is to give Matthew Warchus’s intimate in-the-round production an anthology-like feel, exploding Mary Page’s life into multitudes rather than feeling like it only tells one woman’s story.
Two of the Mary Pages are famous. There’s Andrea Riseborough, the Oscar-nominated Brit character actor who hasn’t been on a stage since the ‘00s. She makes up for lost time: in just three scenes she dominates the play as the middle-aged Mary Page. In the opening scene she speaks in a hushed voice, a dead-eyed mum explaining to her two kids that the family is breaking up. When questioned by her children, she sticks to an evasive, politician-like script. And indeed the exact reasons for the marriage’s end are never fully explained – nor do we meet the kids’ father – but it becomes implicit that the breakup is probably hinged on certain actions of hers. The next time we meet Riseborough’s Mary Page it’s 10 years later, and she’s grappling with alcoholism, suspended between the desire to convey the calm, placid persona she deployed with her kids and a seething rage inside. And in the third – set in between – she is a mess, boozy and emotional; much like (as we know by the stage) her mother before her. \
An exquisite corpse of a life story
Riseborough is great in these scenes – chewing the scenery, yes, but with nuance and feeling and a devastating arsenal of facial expressions: she elevates the blank stare into art, and her delicate face acting is probably the best justification for the in-the-round set up.
The even more famous Susan Sarandon – making her UK stage debut – has less to get stuck into. Playing Mary Page in her eldest years, there is no fault in her acting and at 79 she’s in great form. The trouble is that in all three of her scenes, her Mary Page is essentially content and has largely surmounted the volcanic traumas of her earlier life. Sure, it’s part of the point that Mary Page is different from scene to scene. And there is some subtly devastating stuff quietly revealed in these sections. But Sarandon is tonally adrift from a play that’s mostly about how difficult this woman’s life was - she almost feels like she’s in her own, lower-stakes drama.
Chopping and changing lead actors without aligning their performances is a choice, and it creates an exquisite corpse of a life story, that speaks to the idea that none of us are one single person throughout our lives, that we’re all different people depending on who we’re with, how old we are, how stressed we are, etcetera. Letts’s script is broadly naturalistic, but also loaded with questions about to what extent our lives are predetermined at birth.
There is a vast amount of logistical work involved: the cast has 17 actors, many of whom appear in a single scene only, and the costumes by Rob Howell are a loving journey through decades of popular Western fashion. But Warchus’s kitchen-sinky production feels oddly like it’s trying to play down the theatricality of it all.
The non famous Mary Pages do make their mark: Alisha Weir is haunting as a troubled 12-year-old, repulsing her mother’s toxic disapproval; Rosy McEwen is excellent in the scene where her 27-year-old Mary Page tries to breeze her way out of the presence of a man she’s just slept with without giving anything more of herself away.
Nonetheless, two celebrity Mary Pages, both of whom get more scenes (three each) than their less well known counterparts inevitably leaves it feeling wonky. We can view Mary Page as being different characters throughout her life, but it’s hard not to see the Riseborough scenes and the Sarandon scenes as representing one version of her apiece, not six.
Mary Page Marlowe is clearly an awful lot of hard work to stage (shout out to stage manager Robin Longley and team, who keeps the transitions crisp). I’m not entirely convinced it pays off. If you’re not going to go the whole hog and have Mary Page played by a different actor in every scene, why bother with quite so many as this? If not the full 11 then one younger and one older would surely make it more coherent – and give the performers more to do – than the current uneven distribution. It’s a smart piece of writing that’s given us some fine performances - particularly from Riseborough - but its fussy theatricality ultimately gets in the way.
Old Vic, now until Nov 1. Buy tickets here.
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