Colm Toibin hopes that believers and nonbelievers alike will approach his portrait of Mary, mother of Jesus, with an open mind, and appreciate that he has taken his subject matter seriously. A forlorn hope, since his text cannot fail to offend many believers. Toibin, a lapsed Irish Catholic, took his inspiration for his fictional account of Mary’s life from the enormous contrast between two famous works of art he saw on a visit to Venice: Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin and Tintoretto’s The Crucifixion. His text is in keeping with the physical harsh realism of the latter.
Mary’s appearances in the gospels are few and far between. She rarely speaks. Toibin says he wanted his Mary to speak in the same way that artists of the Renaissance wanted to paint her. His novella is not gospel, it is not theology; it is a work of secular fiction and takes place many years after the Crucifixion when Mary is living in Ephesus. Those seeking a Mary as imagined by Michelangelo, Raphael or Van Eyck may be shocked by Toibin’s Mary, a very human mother, who is filled with anger and whose voice, he says, is based in part on Medea, Electra and Antigone.
Toibin’s fictional Mary does not believe Jesus is the son of God. She describes the disciples as misfits. She fled from the Crucifixion before it was over, leaving her son to die on his own. The Resurrection did not happen; it was merely a dream Mary and Martha shared. Her very final words are: “I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it.”
The heretical novella has been adapted to make an 80-minute monologue. Outside of the medieval mystery plays, I think, that the only time the Virgin Mary has appeared on a London stage was in Max Reinhardt’s wordless epic, The Miracle, at Olympia Hall in 1911. The role was alternated by Maria Carmi and Lady Diana Cooper.
Fiona Shaw, no stranger to the solo performance, having performed T S Eliot’s The Waste Land, Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, has full command of the text and acts it with extraordinary power. Deborah Warner, her director, has given her a landscape and a soundscape suitable for the size of the Barbican stage and auditorium. The performance has a cold, sharp clarity. The descriptions of the raising of Lazarus, the wedding feast at Cana and the horrors of being nailed to a cross are particularly vivid.