Adelaide Reviews

I was grateful for the show, Mary said what she said, because it gave me the opportunity to see some really brilliant theatre, for the second time. That theatre was the brilliant mime show Double Take, a show I saw five days earlier, and which I reviewed (somewhat inexpertly) in these pages. I decided to see it a second time, but I would not have done so had it not been performed at 4 o’clock on the same day as the evening performance of Mary said… In Double Take two mime artists presented eight stories, with the greatest precision and theatrical elegance, in the space of an hour, eliciting first one emotion and then another with quicksilver fluidity.

Going from that show to Mary said what she said was like going from a Mozart piano concerto to one of the more repetitive pieces by Philip Glass. And that is an apt comparison, as Robert Wilson, the director of Mary said… has collaborated with Glass, notably in Einstein on the Beach. In the write-up by the Adelaide Festival, Mary said… is described as containing ‘all the hallmarks of his creative genius’. If true, this is indeed a damning phrase. I don’t think I want to see a show containing only some of the hallmarks of his creative genius.

The script for the play is made up of excerpts from the letters Mary Queen of Scots wrote during her imprisonment, by Queen Elizabeth the First, in Fotheringay Castle. These letters are a very interesting window into the psyche of Mary, and recall much of her remarkably fractured life. It is easy to see how a director might have been attracted to shape a show around them. Had the show been in an intimate theatre, lasting perhaps half an hour at most, it could have had the potential to be engaging. As it was, this half-hour’s worth of substance was spun out by the director, Robert Wilson, into an intolerably repetitive 90 minutes of theatrical bathos in front of a huge audience in the Adelaide Festival Theatre.

Isabelle Huppert is a consummate actor. She, and she alone, was on stage for the entire duration of the show, as Mary Queen of Scots. But the first quarter of an hour of this show, where she was completely stationary facing away from the audience, resembled more Marina Abramovich’s performance art than theatre. It was like drinking fine champagne out of paper cups. After that, she was allowed to move around the stage, and Huppert has the kind of stage presence that commands unwavering attention. But, with no props and only one supporting actor (a sort of shadow Mary) I thought she was wasted in this show. While it may be fascinating to hear what a great pianist can do with ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’ one wants to hear them play Chopin.

Her French was a delight to hear, but most of the time you couldn’t hear it because Einaudi’s inane score was played so loud that it distorted. Ludovico’s music is thin on the ground at the best of times, but to have tracks of his endlessly tape-looped turned it into a caricature of itself. It was the musical equivalent of someone repeating, ad nauseam, a phrase like ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.’ In this respect I have to say that it suited the unbearably repetitious nature of the play quite well.

Wilson has been described as a towering figure in avant-garde theatre. But to call this play theatre at all is using the word very loosely. We waited for some coup de théâtre, and all we got was dry ice. At one moment there are three very loud noises, representing the three blows the drunk executioner needed to sever Mary’s head. Very dramatic. Yet after that, the cycle of Mary’s almost demented ravings and Einaudi’s vacuous easy-listening chords began again, with some text repeated from earlier in the play, and some new text, also endlessly repeated (including, though, interestingly, John Knox’s misogynistic rants). If this isn’t bathos, I’d like to know what is.

Having said all this, I should report that the audience gave the show a standing ovation. Though it has to be said that the laudatory aspect of a standing ovation has been somewhat vitiated in recent times by the increasing prevalence of shows which last up to two hours without interval. Standing up at the end of such endurance tests may be as much the relief of not having to sit down any longer as appreciation of the performance. Be that as it may, the reaction of the audience to Mary said… reminded me of a conversation I had in 1973 with the then professor of German at the University of Cambridge about Hermann Hesse. ‘Some people,’ he said, ‘think Hesse is a genius. Others think he is a charlatan. I am one of those’.

For my part, I think there are far more interesting shows to see in this remarkable Adelaide Festival. Mary said what she said for far too long.