Mary Page Marlowe, Old Vic review – Susan Sarandon and Andrea Riseborough bring brilliance to a fractured story

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.

Sarandon has a winning spikiness and naughtiness as Mary Page’s oldest incarnation. She might not be able to work her telly, but she’s not too old to snog her third husband, or tease the nurse for having too many kids. There are only odd little hints to her past – a sense of her isolation, or of previous pain.

Gradually, Letts’s play unveils this woman’s complex life in expertly crafted scenes that zip back and forth through time, leaving long gaps for the audience’s imagination to step into. Riseborough is heartrending to watch as a much younger Mary still buried in fresh agony: as drained as a vampire’s victim by a divorce, and by her teenage son’s struggles.

Another 20 years back in time, we see a cool, young, brittle Mary Page: here, a compelling Rosy McEwen gets the job of justifying Letts’s intricate approach to this story. She tells her bewildered therapist that she’s always playing a role: wife, sister, mother. Even when she’s having an affair, she’s pretending, hiding her true motives (guilt, or a need for attention).

And her real self? She can’t find it – it’s a fugitive thing, emerging in moments when she sees herself through her loving friends’ eyes (Kingsley Morton is hilarious as a blunt but admiring Connie) or admits to dreams of her own (Paris, of course).

It’s a fascinating perspective on the disconcertingly discontinuous nature of individual identity. As George Orwell put it: “But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.” There’s insight, too, about the way that women are forced into the forms that other people desire and need them to take.

open image in gallery

Still, the odd thing about this play is the way it avoids fully lifting the mask on Mary’s inner life. It’s a deliberate choice, but a frustrating one. And it also means that some of the play’s narrative choices start to feel a bit reductive, tacitly inviting the audience to draw obvious lines of cause and effect. We don’t really see why Mary Page sinks into alcoholism, but a scene where she mixes Old Fashioneds for an acerbic mother makes it clear it’s a family trait. Her father represses his memories of the war, and so of course she hides her emotions, too.

Outgoing Old Vic artistic director Matthew Warchus presides over a swansong production that, perhaps, treats this play with a little too much reverence. The pace is slow, and the scene changes slower (each era comes with its own seating arrangements). Still, his in-the-round staging really does make room for these exceptional performances to shine. And if it’s ultimately a little unsatisfying, so is any attempt to actually sum up a life in one hour and 40 minutes – like any eulogy, it’s both moving and incomplete.

At the Old Vic until 1 November; tickets here