Five fine actresses share one role in the powerful and poignant story of an ordinary woman’s life down the decades
Five actresses sharing one role to show the life of an “ordinary” woman down the decades: theatre knows a winning formula when it hits upon one. In 2024 The Years at the Almeida, my play of the year, did exactly this to devastating effect and so does Mary Page Marlowe, here receiving its UK premiere after a 2016 debut in the US.
Where The Years took a more sexual slant, Mary Page Marlow has a whole-of-life focus that is intimate and unsettling, powerful and poignant, amplified by the fact that its 11 scenes are not played in chronological order. Playwright Tracy Letts offers us tantalising “fragments of a life” and leaves it to us to piece them together and fill in the gaps.
The Old Vic auditorium has been strikingly reconfigured into an in-the-round setting, which adds to the thrilling sense that we are being allowed to eavesdrop on something fiercely personal, the inner workings of another person’s world. It is only at the end of the 100 minutes that we realise the third scene we watch is in fact the penultimate episode time-wise – and the acme of our titular (anti)-heroine’s happiness.
Sixty-three-year-old Mary, played by that fine American actress Susan Sarandon with her trademark combination of steel and smile, is enjoying an unostentatious evening at home with her genial husband Andy (Hugh Quarshie). They bicker lovingly, he calls her a “jailbird” and an official letter arrives bringing good news. A human life, Letts is saying, is an agglomeration of moments both marvellous and unremarkable, often simultaneously.
Sarandon features in three scenes, as does the beguiling Andrea Riseborough, who has been lost to screen work and not seen on a British stage since 2008. The evening starts with her as a pale and anguished 40-year-old Mary, telling her two children that she and their father are splitting up; the reasons for this will gradually be unfurled over subsequent scenes.
It is not only Mary’s red hair that we track across the years, but her gestures: both Riseborough and Rosy McEwen, who plays her at 27 and 36, have a particular way of sitting down and leaning forward in distress. Family traits are also in evidence and we see or hear the chilling impact of addiction on three successive generations.
Matthew Warchus’s sensitive direction points up the question that Letts floats throughout: how much agency do we really have in our own lives? Is it more or less than we think? College-age Mary (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) worries at this, as does McEwen’s iteration, who is indulging in a series of extra-marital liaisons.
By the time it gets to Sarandon’s turn, Mary doesn’t have all the answers but she certainly has more than she started with. There’s hope to be found in that – and in this richly satisfying evening.
To 1 November, Old Vic Theatre, London (0344 871 7628, oldvictheatre.com)
