The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín. Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 1, January 18 – February 25, 2017.
Director – Imara Savage; Designer – Elizabeth Gadsby; Lighting – Emma Valente; Composer and Sound Design – Max Lyandvert.
Performed by Alison Whyte.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 9
I
would not normally begin by mentioning that I was surprised when this
expert and experienced actor lost her lines – three times by my count.
Perhaps it was just one of those nights that all actors fear, but I
think there are deeper reasons in this play and its production.
The
idea of Mary, the mother of Christ, telling her story of her son and
what really happened when he was executed by the Romans (with the
support of the Jewish Elders) is clearly a great beginning point for a
significant play. But in this production, Tóibín’s script makes Mary
into a modern-sounding middle-class woman.
In addition, this
over-grand set and sound design, encompassing a character speaking in an
over-poetical style, at times declamatory, makes for inappropriate
over-blown theatre. Though a few young audience members felt the need
to produce a whoop and whistle or two, because that is how all plays are
to be concluded nowadays, most clapped without very much enthusiasm, as
did I, even though I felt some chagrin considering the hard work that
had gone into the acting.
The title – Testament – would
have been enough for me to suggest the importance of what Mary has to
say. But opening to a cathedral-like backdrop behind Ms Whyte dressed
up as a statue of Mary cradling a child, with a spinning halo of
flashing lights in an apse sculptured by electric flickering candles
made the subject of the play obvious – though, indeed, I was not able to
be sure if this representation of the Virgin might not have meant to be
satirical.
I thought not, though, when Ms Whyte divested herself
in a literally off-hand manner – the plastic statue’s hands were left
scattered on the stage floor along with the dress and the toy sheep
which had seemed to be the Christ-child. Now in bare feet, loose
singlet top and gym pants, Mary tells us why the modern vinyl chair is
forever not to be sat upon and will never be sat upon again, and we
begin to understand that her son, never named except as ‘my son’, will
never come back again.
There is also a large cardboard box, of
the kind used for packing when moving house, with no apparent purpose
until the end of the play, when Mary shows a momentary feeling for the
rich gown her son had once worn, when he was speaking to the assembled
crowds, as she stuffs the remains of her own statue into the box, tapes
it up with very modern packing tape, to more or less kick it off-stage.
So,
as you can imagine, the symbolism is very obvious, emphasised by
blackouts between sections of her story, an ever-changing array of
lighting effects (including one where we, in the audience, were blinded
by massively bright floodlighting), and accompanied by sound effects,
most of which seemed to purport to be background crowd noises –
increasingly ugly as the crucifixion approached.
No wonder this
Mary felt the need to declaim so much – to tell her story at us, rather
than to and for us. It felt to me as if she were in a court, defending
what she knew to be the truth about what had really happened against
some accusing lawyer. But the problem for me was that this made me feel
as if I were her accuser – as if I believed the story of the Virgin
Mary as the Church, that is the Catholic Church, had made her appear to
be.
So I got that point, but I missed the feeling – of sympathy
and understanding for an ordinary woman from a struggling household
wanting to do her best for her son, who turned out to be a charismatic
con man instead of a sensible ordinary working man like his father.
Instead of staging her story in this way, I think Tóibín’s playscript –
even despite the diverging complexities which would inevitably be
confusing – would have worked far more powerfully without the
theatricality.
I saw a woman going through a life in which her
love for her child is tragically destroyed. She has only an empty space
and her memories. I see her in a warm light, seated on a rough wooden
bench, across from the other one – the empty one – talking to us
personally, as if privately, about her life and what happened to her
son. She wants us to believe her, not the gossip we may have heard or
the stories made up by the people who were taken in by her son’s
silliness. Her story is mainly quiet explanation of what she knows to
be the truth.
Though my production would give little work for a
lighting designer and maybe for some sound at the beginning and the end,
the stage designer would need only to ensure that this woman’s world
was kept enclosed in that intimate little pool of light while the
director would work closely and intensely with her actor on expressing
each of the myriad feelings Mary experiences as she remembers, tells us
and explains to us. In keeping with much of Tóibín’s language, I hear
an Irish accent and intonation patterns as she speaks.
Then, I
feel, with no grandiosity, no abrupt stops and starts, no blackouts, no
alarums of lights and sound, there would be no lines lost in the 80
minutes of the telling of the Testament of Mary. And there would
be a silence of appreciation for the actor, and a silence of
understanding of the reality of the life of Mary, mother of Jesus.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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