Five actors playing one character is a notion that London theatregoers know well. In The Years, adapted from Annie Ernaux’s semi-autobiographical novel, the idea cohered into a personal history of someone living through wartime and post-war Europe.
This UK premiere of Tracy Letts’s play has no such sweeping backdrop, however. Rather the setting is largely domestic while the focus is on the unremarkable life of one American woman.
Yet by the end of Matthew Warchus’s uninterrupted, in-the-round production of 90 minutes we know a lot about the life of Mary Page Marlowe.
We know about her three husbands, her two children and her affairs. We also know about the destruction brought about by her drinking and, in the scenes played by this ensemble cast’s biggest star, Susan Sarandon, how in late middle age the chaos was replaced by content and calm, albeit informed by grief and regret.
It is a story told in fragments. Eleven succinctly written and superbly performed scenes are scattered seemingly at random and in no particular chronological order. The result leaves the audience to piece the jigsaw together.
Sarandon brings a stillness and steel to the play yet it is Andrea Riseborough who delivers its outstanding performance. This will be no surprise to those who have seen Riseborough’s Oscar-nominated turn in the movie To Leslie. And true, here she gets to play the moments of greatest drama in the life of Mary Page Marlowe. Yet as this mother who is about to become a single parent, and as the single parent who is lost to alcohol, the excellent Risborough deftly underplays moments of crisis rather than, as lesser actors do, milk them for all they are worth.
You leave with the powerful sense that no life is uninteresting, no matter how well or wastefully lived.
Mary Page Marlowe
Old Vic
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