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by Colm Tóibín, directed by Aaron Willis

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

May 17-June 18, 2016

Mary: “I am not one of his followers”

On the surface Irish author Colm Tóibín’s play The Testament of Mary (2014) presents the Virgin Mary’s view of her son’s life, death and resurrection.  On another level it is a play about how reality can turn into myth.  Tóibín’s Mary witnesses how not just her son’s life but her own are being transformed from facts to be known into deeds to inspire belief.  This frightens her and the main contribution of Tóibín’s play may be to force us,whether believers of not, to experience the life of Jesus in an entirely new way.  While Nancy Palk gives an outstanding performance as Mary, the production is almost undone by director Aaron Willis’s heavy-handed use of Richard Feren’s soundscape. 

The narrative, based on Tóibín’s 2012 novel of the same name, takes place in Mary’s house in Ephesus, where even today you can visit a house that visions of a 19th-century nun identified as the place where Mary lived until her assumption, traditionally circa 43ad.  Designer Lorenzo Savoini has imagined it as a semi-derelict café with tables and a number of chairs strewn about the floor.  Very cleverly Savoini has selected chairs from many periods – from turned wooden slat-back chairs to modern metal folding chairs.  Just as Gillian Gallow has clad Mary in a grey-tunic and woollen shawl that could be either ancient or modern, so Savoini has placed her in a setting that evokes no single historical period.

Tóibín assumes that the audience will know the circumstances of Mary’s life in Ephesus, but those unfamiliar with the apocryphal Gospels or early Greek theologians likely will not.  Tóibín presents Mary as a virtual prisoner in her own house.  The loud prison-door slams of Feren’s soundscape may lead an audience to think she is being held by enemies of Christians.  In fact, she is being guarded to protect her from those who after Jesus’s death set out to kill anyone associated with him. 

Tóibín’s Mary begins and ends her story with complaints against the two men, likely two of the evangelists, who have set out to record Jesus’s life and death and claim that their narratives will change the entire world forever.  What disturbs her is that the men are not interested in recording everything the way that she experienced it.  Details she finds important they neglect entirely.  It is clear to her that they have come to her only to hear what will fit into a story whose content and purpose has already been determined.

Tóibín presents us with a very human Mary.  As far as she knows Jesus is her son by Joseph, whose death she still mourns.  She has received no divine communication about her son’s purpose on earth and is disturbed by the rumours she hears of what he has said and what people claim he has done.  His claims that he is the son of God and the king of the Jews put him in trouble with both the secular and religious authorities, the Romans and the Jewish Elders.  Mary’s cousin Marcus (Tóibín’s invention) warns Mary to stop her son before he is arrested. 

Tóibín’s Mary is thus as amazed as is everyone else at the miracles her son performs or is said to have performed.  She doubts the tale that he has walked on water and that he actually changed water into wine.  Yet, the most effective sequence of the evening is Mary’s description of Jesus’s bringing Lazarus back to life.  Palk invests this account with both wonder and horror, for Tóibín’s Mary is disturbed by the power he son seems to have and fears the consequences of his performing deeds that go contrary to the order of nature.  She does not see in Lazarus’ resurrection a model for the resurrection of humankind but a horrifying reanimation in which the barely living Lazarus will now have to die twice.

Some Christians may not want to see Mary as an ordinary human mother who doesn’t understand why her son is becoming the focus of a new religion.  Others will feel they have never come to know Mary better and that her human reactions to the personal, political and religious discord around her make all the more real. 

Director Aaron Willis shows ingenuity in having Palk cover the entire playing area on stage and in the audience during a monologue which could have been staged with her absolutely still in a spotlight.  He errs however in having sound designer Richard Feren accompany virtually the entire 75 minutes of the monologue with a soundtrack that far too often is disruptive.  Why every time when Mary mentions crowds do we have to hear generic crowd sounds?  Why do we hear the sounds of a metal prison door slamming shut periodically throughout the show, even when prisons are not mentioned?  And why has Feren, who has produced such sensitive soundscapes for other shows, allowed himself to use background music that sounds like the soundtrack of some overblown 1950s biblical epic?  Such music and the sanctimoniousness that goes with it could hardly be less appropriate to Tóibín’s treatment of the subject matter.

Willis should keep in mind the words of the Chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V: “Think when we talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth”.  Words, not recorded sounds, are meant to work on our imagination.  Words are all Tóibín’s Mary has to counter the words of the evangelists whose words will soon subsume hers for their own purposes.

If you are open to seeing Jesus’s life from a different, non-religious point of view, Tóibín’s play captures the atmosphere of fear, distrust and exaltation at this time of political and religious ferment better than any other play or film.  Tóibín, who was devoted to Mary as a boy and young adult, may deny his stage creation divine knowledge, yet, in celebrating her as a mother and as a woman, he helps make her grief and agony more palpable.                      

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Nancy Palk as Mary; Nancy Palk as Mary. ©2016 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit http://www1.soulpepper.ca.