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Oscar-winner Susan Sarandon makes a scanty but impactful and democratic London stage debut here. She’s the eldest of five actresses (plus one doll) playing a woman glimpsed at different stages of life in Tracy Letts’s well-crafted, prismatic play. Her three scenes take up around 15 minutes of the show’s 100-minute exploration of the titular, more-or-less Catholic Ohio accountant, and they have a warm, elegiac understatement.
It’s an undeniable thrill to see the star of Rocky Horror, Thelma and Louise and Dead Man Walking in the flesh and close up – Matthew Warchus’s in-the-round production puts her almost in touching distance of the first three rows. But Sarandon deftly serves the play and the ensemble rather than dominating the event.
The fireworks go to a shifty, slippery Rosy McEwen and a wracked and haunted Andrea Riseborough who play the title character from her later 20s to the age of 50, as a wife, mother, adulteress, divorcee and alcoholic. Mary Page, born to a traumatised World War Two veteran, is constantly pigeonholed by society or the men around her.
Alisha Weir (in her first stage role) and Eleanor Worthington-Cox show us the character as a malleable pre-teen and a watchful 19-year-old student desperate to escape convention. The doll represents Mary Page as a baby, absorbing her parents’ acrimony and secrecy by osmosis.
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The play is not as profound as it thinks it is and certainly doesn’t approach the brutal majesty of Letts’s Tony and Pulitzer winning domestic tragicomedy August: Osage County. But it is a subtle and elegantly constructed piece of work.
Each of its eleven scenes stand alone as dramatic snapshots of a life, but each informs the others. We connect threads, yet we’ll only ever have a partial picture of Mary Page, as we do of pretty much everyone. “Things are not what they appear to be,” says a fellow student, casting her tarot. Telling a palliative care nurse about her job, Sarandon’s final version of Mary Page says it’s rare for all the numbers to add up. Even a woman who considers herself “unexceptional” will have unknowable depths.
The play opens with Riseborough’s version of the character, aged 40, telling her kids Wendy and Louis that she and their father Sonny are divorcing. Then comes the easy comedy of the college tarot scene. And then, OMG, it’s her – Sarandon, playing a comfily-clad and easygoing retiree, but those eyes, that bone structure and that presence are riveting.
Her Mary Page banters with third husband Andy (Hugh Quarshie) while they eat pasta and watch Hugh Laurie in House. Intrigue creeps in, along with an eloquently small gamut of emotion from Sarandon, as we learn that Mary Page went to prison for something that required her to “pee in a cup” and not leave the state.
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We never see Sonny but later we see McEwen’s MPM explain to a shrink why she cheats on him (“shame… guilt… power”). Then we watch her trying to extricate herself from an impulsive tryst she apparently initiated with her manager. Riseborough’s Mary Page has a spectacular screaming match with interim husband Ray about her self-destructiveness, the main reason for which is revealed late, and clumsily.
There’s glibness in Mary Page’s repeated hankering for Paris, when even Kentucky feels alien. And in the symbol of an American quilt – a patchwork by many women – that tops and tails the show. The large supporting cast acquit themselves well, mostly in cameos, in Warchus’s polished production. There’s not much of a set but the costumes – pleated stonewashed jeans, velour track pants, rainbow sneaker-laces – neatly signify era and place.
This is an elegant, bittersweet ensemble piece, inspired by the death of Letts’s mother and informed by his sensitivity as a Tony-nominated actor. It gives Riseborough and McEwan lots to chew on. And after scenes as a twinkly elder and a dying sardonic crone, the 79-year-old Sarandon reappears at the end as a 59-year-old Mary Page, careworn but upbeat and absolutely radiant. Pretty amazing.
To 1 Nov, oldvictheatre.com.
