Review: MARY PAGE MARLOWE, Starring Susan Sarandon and Andrea Riseborough

Watching Mary Page Marlowe you feel like you're constantly trying to piece together a mosaic of one woman’s life, glimpsed in snapshots, lit by moments of clarity, yet never forming a complete picture. Under the direction of Matthew Warchus, in his final season as Artistic Director at the Old Vic, the production stages Tracy Letts’s play non-chronologically, across 11 scenes spanning seven decades, that show Mary at various ages. 

Mary is an accountant, a daughter, a mother, a woman trapped in expectations and in her own regrets; she grapples with addiction, relationships, and shame. Letts refuses to give us tidy explanations: key relationships and secrets are implied rather than clearly explained, and the fragments are allowed to float. This gives the play its power but also leaves gaps that sometimes leave the audience feeling unfulfilled. The writing shakes with intensity in moments but in others can feel almost distant in its restraint.  Staging the play in the round makes it feel more intimate; we see Mary from multiple sides, literally, and that sense of being always partly removed or partly known fits the play. 

Susan Sarandon, in her UK stage debut, plays the elder Mary at ages 59, 63 and 69. Her performance is brilliantly still and magnetic – she conveys the physical weariness of age but also an internal steadiness. It is an excellent portrayal of a woman who has lived through so much, carrying the weight of her experiences in the set of her shoulders. 

If Sarandon provides the play with its emotional gravity, Andrea Riseborough supplies the volatility that keeps it alive. As Mary in her forties and fifties, she charts the character’s middle-aged unravelling with raw immediacy – she’s brittle, impulsive, quick to flare and yet never reduced to cliché. Riseborough’s scenes crackle with the tension of someone trying to outrun her own choices, making her Mary the most unpredictable and, at times, the most heartbreaking. She finds flashes of humour in the character’s defences, letting us glimpse the charm that once drew others in before swiftly revealing the self-destructive streak beneath.

The younger incarnations of Mary, played by a strong ensemble (Rosy McEwen - as Mary aged 27 and 36, Alisha Weir - as a 12 year old Mary, and Eleanor Worthington-Cox as a 19 year old Mary), offer flashes of her past, trauma, damaged relationships and rebellion, the things that will define her later life. These actors do much to sow the seeds for what Sarandon and Riseborough reveal in full bloom during their scenes.

Still, there are things that frustrate. The very structure that is Letts’s artistic choice, the non-chronology, the jumping between ages, the withholding of explanation, means that Mary always remains partly elusive. We get many scenes that are powerful in themselves, but too often we are pulled away before the undercurrents fully develop. The play teases its themes of identity, gender roles, and self-knowledge but often lets them drift, without resolution.

Ultimately, Mary Page Marlowe proves a thoughtful and often moving exploration of a life lived. The performances from each Mary and the excellent supporting cast give the piece its heartbeat, even when the episodic structure keeps the audience slightly at bay. It is a production worth seeing for its remarkable acting and for the way it asks us to piece together, from fragments, the mysteries of an ordinary, complicated life.

Mary Page Marlowe is at the Old Vic until 1 November.

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