"It's a performance that emphasizes the theatricality and imaginative power of Toibin's story." None of these things are in the printed script, and they begin to feel so calculated and intellectualized that an airlessness pervades the proceedings." "Mary is seen smoking joints of marijuana and swigging from a commercially labeled liquor bottle. Joe Dziemianowicz for New York Daily News "Fiona Shaw ignites and glows with a fevered intensity and intelligence in this bold and indelibly theatrical work." I was reminded again why I return to the theatre for nourishment over and over and over again. So yes there are details that don’t quite work, but these pale in comparison to the union of Shaw and this text. If you get there early enough you are allowed onto the set to view the icon herself which achieved the desired effect of making Mary into flesh even before the play began. As well there is the now famous vulture that seems to serve no purpose. Deborah Warner’s direction keeps Shaw peripatetic – and there are some questions as to the myriad of props she works through, picking them up and putting them down in one endless motion. The combination of Tóibín and Shaw is electrifying. And in the end, she will not give sway to the men who would create her son’s story. She will storm and fill the heavens with her voice. She will not be stilled into a homogenized silence. This is a mother who chose life and is living in the land of remembering. And when the danger for her own life became too great, she left his side. She returned for the crucifixion, not to warn or comfort but to witness. Her son was being followed, and his demise was being fomented.Īfter one final attempt to warn him at the wedding at Cana, where Lazarus was raised from the dead (not very successful that) and water turned into wine, she left him. She lived on rumors and reports of the miracles – the crippled made to walk, the blind to see – as well as the danger coming closer. But when he left her to walk with his companions she did nothing. She objected to her son’s recklessness for it would lead to catastrophe. Actually she was bored by them, as well as the way that her son behaved around them. Her son (she will not speak his name) gathered around him a bunch of misfits only children like him, or men without fathers, or men who could not look a woman in the eye, men who were seen smiling to themselves. Her memories rush through her like a mad river. She will not be mollified by her keepers (presumably the apostles) who tell her that by keeping the story and the memory of her son alive they will change the world. She roams the stage like a lioness searching for the scent of a cub. Her rage moves through her like a virus, and she can barely stay still for more than a minute or so. This is a woman in a rage that will not be quieted. This is not the beatific frozen woman draped in clean flowing blue garb and standing vigil to the side of the altar, or the woman in repose after childbirth (not a messy business for her, certainly) receiving visitors in a barn, or the delicate and mute doll-like form who holds her oddly mature infant on her lap in holy perpetuity. This Mary is not the mild mannered icon that Christianity, and the Catholic Church n particular, has given us. It is a spare and direct accounting of a mother whose son chose to be a targeted man rather than keep his mouth shut and live a long life. Colm Tóibín has written a book from which this play has been mined. This is a story and a performance that are beyond spectacular.Īnd it all starts with the word. Do yourself the favor of the decade and go see this show. But when I see a show that is takes me out of this world, it is a challenge to find words for that. Sometimes it is easier to review something I didn’t like.
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