Quite Contrary

My, oh my, and I thought the staging of PIPPIN was busy! I saw a wonderful one-person show today called THE TESTAMENT OF MARY starring Fiona Shaw and the staging was very...European.

Before the play began Ms Shaw and her stage management crew ambled onstage and Ms Shaw donned the above garb and entered a glass cube where she sat surrounded by candles. Suddenly, like lemmings, the Wednesday matinee audience jammed the aisles as if by some command unheard only by me and clambered unsteadily onto the stage where they examined the vast array of scattered props, one of which was a very large black bird, apparently a vulture.

 After several minutes of that the audience shuffled back to their seats, the glass cube was raised never to be seen again, the stage managers removed its contents and Ms Shaw communed with the bird for a bit before everyone finally left the stage and the show began.

 TT and I once saw a production of VIRGINIA WOOLF in Venice (I know, I never thought I would type that sentence) where the set consisted of a double bed, a bank of nine television sets tied together with rope, a Chevrolet, a theatrical dressing table, an "APPLAUSE" sign spelled out in lightbulbs...you get the picture. It was gobsmacking, and illuminated a thrilling new interpretation of the text.

I appreciated Deborah Warner's operatic staging of Colm Toibin's monologue in which we meet Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the years after her son's crucifixion. Still locked into an all consuming grief, she cannot bring herself to say her son's name as she recounts her version of the events that "changed the world".

It's a fascinating script brilliantly acted, particularly Mary's growing unease with her son's followers.."a bunch of misfits"..and her horror at seeing Lazarus raised from the grave only to wander like an uncommunicative zombie before beginning to die again days later, and her disgust when Jesus...dressed way too elaborately for her liking...rather pompously turns water into wine (or so she's informed) at a family wedding.  When she tries to warn her son that his actions are putting him in grave danger she is crushed when he treats her like a total stranger.

This is all fabulously gripping stuff, and Mary's account of the crucifixion and its aftermath is truly harrowing. But the production is incredibly busy and seems not to trust the text or our attention span. The Misses Warner and Shaw may well be right but I was most distracted by the endless and seemingly random putting on and taking off of garments, dragging of props from stage left to stage right, cigarettes brandished and remaining unlit, the hefting of huge clay jugs, ladders and coils of barbed wire, trees rising and falling, curtains and backdrops opening and closing. She even takes off all her clothes and goes for a little swim. You'd never see Miriam Margolyes doing all that in DICKENS' WOMEN.

But having said all that, I would recommend it wholeheartedly if it's coming to a theatre near you!