THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Tracy Letts
Old Vic Theatre, The Cut, London SE1, until November 1, 2025
Tracy Letts’ new play, a gentle yet quietly devastating portrait of a very ordinary woman, has the texture of a great novel. Mary Page is a ‘middle class’ woman from Kentucky, an accountant no less, whose life unfolds for us not in a linear arc but in scattered, elliptical, fragments. She’s played by five actors in non-chronological scenes in this taut, 100 minute, cubist drama.
Mary is not extraordinary; she is not a hero or a villain. She is, in many ways, unremarkable, and that is precisely the point. Letts’ play insists that every life, no matter how ordinary, contains multitudes. The result is a deeply humane work that will linger in the mind long after.
Letts, who wrote the modern masterpiece August: Osage County, stated that his intention in having multiple actors play the role at different ages was to portray the unknowable nature of a person. It works. The writing and acting are so good here, under the expert direction of Matthew Warchus, that you desperately want to complete the jigsaw; you root for Mary but there is still enough missing to make you unsure of her. Some may grumble about the absence of a clearer emotional throughline as you’d get in a more conventional play, but it mirrors how we get to know someone, quietly over time, taking in what they reveal but wondering what they conceal. It begs us to question how do we really know anyone?
The play’s non-linear structure might first appear abrupt, scenes are brief, sometimes only a few minutes long but the fragmentation mirrors Mary’s own disjointed experience – a difficult childhood with neglectful parents, her struggles with alcoholism which end up scarring her life, two failed marriages until a happy third, making a general mess of motherhood, and the search for meaning in a life that never quite settles. What’s great is that Letts resists the temptation to justify her choices. Instead, he gives us moments, some mundane, others momentous and he trusts us to assemble the puzzle. Scenes often end with an emotional beat which is a knockout and Andrea Riseborough, who plays her during her dark middle aged years, delivers a number of those – such as when, collapsed drunken on the floor, she tries to connect with her emotionally worn out daughter by telling her how much she admires her.
Five actors and a baby doll portray her across different ages, from infancy to old age, each revealing a distinct facet of her character. The casting coup is the great Susan Sarandon, making her London stage debut, who lends the elder Mary that disarming touch of jaded ennui which is her forte. A true star, she holds the audience rapt... you want to find out more.
Riseborough and Rosy McEwen deliver the standout performances, though, as Mary in her turbulent middle age when she’s sexually adventurous at a time and place when that was dangerous. Eleanor Worthington-Cox (the original Matilda of course) and Alisha Weir are wonderfully poignant too as the younger Mary, each capturing the defiance but also that broken wing vulnerability, learned from rejection, which are threaded throughout Mary’s life.
Warchus’ in-the-round staging is perfect for this confessional piece making the audience complicit in Mary’s triumphs and failures. Rob Howell’s minimalist design allows the performances to shine, and the fluid transitions between scenes maintain a sense of momentum despite the play’s episodic nature. Howell’s clothes (too perfectly lived in to call them costumes) a perfect evocation of period and class from the buttoned-up ‘50s to the stone washed jean hideousness of the ‘80s.
