French screen and stage legend Isabelle Huppert will bring her acclaimed performance as Mary Stuart, AKA Mary, Queen of Scots, to Australia in March as part of an exclusive season for the 2026 Adelaide festival.
Mary Said What She Said, a one-woman show created by late theatre luminary Robert Wilson for Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, where it premiered in 2019, stars Huppert as the ill-fated monarch and devout Catholic whose dispute over the English throne with her Protestant cousin Queen Elizabeth I cost her her life.
The play, written by novelist Darryl Pinckney, is set in the lead-up to Mary’s execution for treason in 1587 after 19 years in captivity and draws on Stuart’s letters to craft a “testimony” against accusations that she plotted, among other things, to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.
Reviewing the show’s UK premiere in 2024, the Guardian critic Claire Armitstead described Huppert’s performance as “astounding”. “Alone on stage for 90 minutes, she performs something between a rite and an elaborate courtly dance, her stylised, repetitive movements and moments of stillness accompanied by Pinckney’s poetic script casting a spell over her audience,” Armitstead wrote.
Huppert has described the role as physically demanding: “I’m alone, but I’m not lonely because I am mentally, emotionally and spiritually very much surrounded, you know, because of all these people I am talking to. Plus, I have so much to do – the dancing, the different levels of voices. It keeps me very busy,” she said last year.
Huppert is perhaps best known for her screen collaborations with Austrian auteur Michael Haneke, including 2001’s The Piano Teacher, for which she won the best actress award at Cannes. More recently, she appeared in the Oscar-nominated comedy Mrs Harris Goes to Paris.
Wilson, a Texas-born theatre maker and visual artist, made his name with strikingly designed, non-naturalistic stage works, from his breakthrough 1976 production of the Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach to his monologue take on Hamlet and the opera The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, conceived with singer-songwriter Tom Waits and author William S Burroughs. He died on 31 July at the age of 83.
Mary Said What She Said is Huppert’s third and last stage collaboration with Wilson, who she described as “a genius, one of the great, great theatre inventors of our century”.
Mary Said What She Said will headline Adelaide festival alongside performances by the French choir and orchestra Ensemble Pygmalion. The full program will be announced on 27 October.
Adelaide festival will run 27 February to 15 March 2026.
