Idol, activist, absolute freaking legend Susan Sarandon is close enough to touch, right there on stage. She is vivid, utterly present and believable as the oldest iteration of the title character. As are the superb Andrea Riseborough, Rosy McEwen, Eleanor Worthington-Cox and Alisha Weir as Mary Page Marlowe in her forties, thirties, late teens and childhood.
The inside of The Old Vic has been completely reconfigured in the round, with seating and balconies added to the side and back, the main stalls built into tiered stadium-style rows. I was already over-excited at the prospect of the cast in a UK premiere of a play by the tremendous Tracy Letts, it only increased when I saw the new layout.
What an extraordinary amount of time, talent and effort has gone into delivering so very little. Across 100 minutes with no interval, we jump back and forth in time, piecing together one woman’s life. The trumpeted quote: “No one is ever going to see me… I’m not the person I am… I’m just acting” is already borderline pretentious/clichéd but is also self-fulfilling. The stunningly underwhelming script delivers thinly-drawn vignettes that by mid-way you sense are going absolutely nowhere, and then just sags downhill to a rather toe-curling final speech.
What a phenomenal waste of such fine actresses and a stacked supporting cast, many of who barely have a few lines in one scene. Melanie La Barrie, fresh from taking her lead role as Hermes in Hadestown to Broadway, is reduced to a stock feisty Caribbean nurse. The electrifying Wothington-Cox won an Olvier for Matilda and was nominated again for Next To Normal. Here, she has one scene as college-age Mary, playing tarot cards with two college friends. That she still shines, like everyone on stage, is testiment to their own talent and not the writing.
I’ve just seen the superb Sophie Melville wasted as a clichéd Middle America white trash, addict, bad mother in Samuel D Hunter’s Clarkston. Letts gives us a worn down Middle America white, lower middle-class, alcoholic, bad mother. Flashbacks to her own damaged, lonely, unfulfilled alcoholic mother Roberta (Eden Epstein) suggest inescapable cycles. Her son, it is clunkily foreshadowed, will repeat the pattern.
Mary cheats on her husbands, drinks, parents poorly, goes to prison. She briefly finds happiness towards the end with a good man Andy (Hugh Quarshie) but we get no sense of her journey to some form of self-acceptance and inner peace. An utterly pointless single mid-way therapy session drags and is the moment when I started to lose any interest or investment.
The show starts with a quilt laid on a table. It ends with Sarandon’s Mary talking about it to a dry-cleaner, musing on the many panels sewn by different women. It’s frayed and worn (sigh) and my toes were already flexing before she got to one, mysterious panel of an unknown, unknowable women with her turned away. As metaphors go, it is excruciatingly tired and prosaic. The unashamedly schmaltzy, feelgood movie How To Make an American Quilt did it so much better. This is like the Temu trailer trash edit.
The staging, so exciting at first glance, adds nothing to the experience, with laborious blackouts to generic theatrical string and piano solos for the many, many scene changes. The jumping back and forth in time, an intriguing prospect, adds nothing and the volume of scenes prevents any momentum or depth.
If Letts’ utterly staggering multi-generational family drama August Osage County was a masterpiece oil painting of surface beauty and dark, churning depths, this is a stick-figure crayon sketch that goes nowhere and shows you nothing you haven’t already seen, heard and thought before.
MARY PAGE MARLOWE AT THE OLD VIC TO NOVEMBER 1