Review Roundup: What Did the Critics Think of Susan Surandon's London Debut in MARY PAGE MARLOWE?

Mary Page Marlowe is an accountant from Ohio. She's led an ordinary life, making the difficult decisions we all face as we try to figure out who we really are and what we really want. As Tracy Letts brings us moments-both pivotal and mundane-from Mary's life, a portrait of a surprisingly complicated woman emerges. Intimate and moving, Mary Page Marlowe shows us how circumstance, impulse and time can combine to make us mysteries...even to ourselves.

Susan Surandon makes her London stage debut, alongside Andrea Riseborough, who returns to the stage after 15 years.

What did the critics think?

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

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan

Laura Jones, BroadwayWorld: 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.

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: It is beautifully directed by Matthew Warchus, who elicits magnificent performances from the ensemble. Sarandon performs with ease, assurance and total ownership of her character; Riseborough, in scraped back ponytail, is astonishing as a woman whose life has hurtled off-course. Rosy McEwen, as an unfaithful wife who feels like an actor in her own life, is a scintillating, dangerous force on stage. The two youngest Marys – the 12-year-old trying to impress her heavy-drinking mother, played by Alisha Weir, and Eleanor Worthington-Cox’s hopeful high-school pupil – are also a pleasure to watch, as is the entire cast.

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: But it is the acting, particularly of the Marys, that carries the day. Riseborough is an actor who always seems to be missing a skin; she brings all that raw intensity and eyes full of emotion to the scenes where Mary battles with divorce and despair; McEwen captures both the underlying instability and the bold determination to reject male expectations that drives Mary to both therapy and casual, pointless affairs. In their single scenes, both Worthington-Cox and Weir seize their moment with coruscating honesty and openness. Apart from Quarshie, all the men are ciphers, but Eden Epstein is compelling as Mary’s mother Roberta.

Alice Saville, The Independent: A formidable army of female talent has gone into the Old Vic's staging of Mary Page Marlowe, a 2016 play by American writer Tracy Letts (August: Osage County) that's very loosely inspired by his late mother's life story. This enigmatic, hard drinking woman is played by no fewer than five actors, including both Andrea Riseborough (who brilliantly embodied another alcoholic in the 2022 film To Leslie) and a 79-year-old Susan Sarandon making her belated London stage debut. To be a woman is to play a part, we're told. And if all these bodies somehow fail to fit together into a single living, breathing portrait of an actual person, each still brings some brilliance of its own to this fractured story.

Dominic Maxwell, The Times: So what can you call Mary Page Marlowe? Because this British debut for Tracy Letts’s 2016 play is an odd 100 minutes of theatre, structurally at least. Matthew Warchus’s precision production begins with a superb diner scene in which Mary Page tells her children she’s leaving the family home. Seemingly significant statements (“Sometimes we do things we shouldn’t do”) stud the small, sharp observations. Riseborough keeps it real but lets you feel the character’s soul. Great writing.

Andrzej Lukowski, TimeOut: The even more famous Susan Sarandon – making her UK stage debut – has less to get stuck into. Playing Mary Page in her eldest years, there is no fault in her acting and at 79 she’s in great form. The trouble is that in all three of her scenes, her Mary Page is essentially content and has largely surmounted the volcanic traumas of her earlier life. Sure, it’s part of the point that Mary Page is different from scene to scene. And there is some subtly devastating stuff quietly revealed in these sections. But Sarandon is tonally adrift from a play that’s mostly about how difficult this woman’s life was - she almost feels like she’s in her own, lower-stakes drama.

Nick Curtis, The Standard: 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.

Aliya Al-Hassan, London Theatre: These snapshots are not always flattering or happy, and much is left unsaid and unexplored. Perhaps she went to prison for drink-driving and it’s hinted that she had an abortion in college. Letts presents pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that make up Mary’s life, not the whole picture. This disjointed approach can be challenging as Letts offers up a whisper of truth, then sometimes snatches it away. But many will recognise how memories are often fragmented and that we rarely know the full story of someone’s life.

Claire Allfree, The Telegraph: We see Sarandon first at the dinner table with what turns out to be Mary’s third husband, her deceptively artless performance at once sexy, tricky, playful, effortlessly lived in. There is a hint, also, of past crisis – a hallmark of Letts’s non-chronological format, which lets slip little shards of information that only later make sense. She is also terrific a few scenes later in a hospital ward, reckoning with a life’s pile-up of failures with battle-hardened humour, and refusing to sugar-coat the fact she is dying.

Average Rating: 68.9%