When she speaks of how memory is what fills her body now, instead of blood and bones, her eyes burn black. This Mary is an ordinary woman of her day, forced against her will into a role in history she never sought or wanted.

Toibin, Mary’s account of the last years of her son’s life is remarkable in how it grounds its familiar tales in the context of the everyday, and particularly in the perspective of a mother who can’t understand what her son has become. Shaw’s abilities to command as an actress have only grown.Īs written by Mr. And there are moments in “Testament” that demonstrate that Ms. Warner in 1996 in a derelict 42nd Street theater, and I felt I was watching a cast of hundreds. Warner, of all people, should know better. Shaw on productions of Euripides’ “Medea” and Beckett’s “Happy Days” - didn’t trust sufficiently in the power of her star and script to captivate a big Broadway audience. By the time we get to Calvary, you have a good idea of how she is going to use that long wooden ladder and those coils of barbed wire. When she talks about the transformation of water into wine, she hefts a large clay vessel onto a table. Speaking of the death and resurrection of Lazarus, she covers her face with a shroudlike cloth. As Mary describes the events leading up to her son’s death, she employs all sorts of heavy visual aids. She has divested the stage of one landscape of smothering iconography only to substitute another. Warner is going to err on the side of literal-mindedness. Long before that moment of confrontational nudity, you will have probably surmised that Ms. It was just what I needed as a tonic after the gooier excesses of Broadway. Shaw can be, I was all set for an evening of searing, austere eloquence. Toibin’s book of the same title, an expansion of the script for this play, and knowing how transfixing Ms. That it doesn’t quite work out that way ranks as one of the greater disappointments in a season that has made a practice of dashing hopes. This is to be Mary stripped bare, the better for us to grasp the suffering reality of a woman doomed to live with the memories of a son taken from her first by fame and then by a terrible public death. The only winged creature we see her with is a live vulture, which appears in a prologue to the show. So there’ll be no seraphim fluttering about the head of this Mary. And she wants to be allowed, for once, to tell her story on her terms, and to appear to us unencumbered by the signs and symbols that history and devotion have layered upon her. The Mary whose testament we have gathered to hear is the mother of Jesus. The ads for this production, directed by Deborah Warner, feature the play’s sole performer, Fiona Shaw, wearing what appears to be a crown of thorns, but as a muzzle. Just let the woman speak, for pity’s sake.Ī great actress and a fine, trenchant script are struggling to assert themselves at the Walter Kerr Theater, where Colm Toibin’s “Testament of Mary” opened on Monday night.

The testament of mary fiona shaw