Susan Sarandon is effortlessly sexy in her UK stage debut
It's not quite a case of blink and you'll miss her, but Susan Sarandon, making her UK theatre debut at 79, is on stage for – at a guess – approximately 20 minutes in this fragmented portrait of Mary Page Marlowe . The eponymous woman is played by five actresses at different stages of her life, from the age of 12 to 69. Sarandon is, to be fair, marvellous in her three scenes as the oldest incarnation of Mary. Yet audiences would be forgiven for expecting a bit more bang for their buck.
And although American writer Tracy Letts's 2016 play pre-dates the recent smash-hit adaptation of Annie Ernaux's The Years , which marries form and content in similar ways, it's hard to shake the nagging feeling that we have seen this theatrical conceptualising of a woman struggling to fit inside the various pieces of her life before.
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.
Sarandon gives a deceptively artless performance as the older Mary, opposite Hugh Quarshie as Andy - Manuel Harlan
Yet she is, whisper it, outclassed here by Andrea Riseborough, who plays Mary during her 40s, at more pivotal moments in her life, and who, let's face it, is given more to do.
Oscar-nominated for To Leslie , Riseborough has cornered the market in scrawny, pugilistic, alcohol-raddled women, and in the second of her non-chronological appearances, we see her mid-life Mary – nerves jangled, almost physically caved-in, yet still alive, still defiant – making it plain to her (second) husband that her drink-driving conviction this time will certainly land her in jail. During a later, vodka-sodden conversation with her teenage daughter about her younger son Louis, who has gone missing, she delivers a masterclass in pathetic, bravado-charged despair.
Andrea Riseborough plays Mary during her 40s, at more pivotal moments in her life - Manuel Harlan
Letts's play almost entirely comprises superbly written one-on-one encounters that emulate and sometimes become a warped form of confessional, teasing the audience with the prospect that each will contain the revelation that makes sense of the whole.
Yet there is a glibness to the way this is largely what transpires. And while Matthew Warchus's in-the-round production conveys the illusion of intimacy, its tonal monotony sometimes works against it. Letts packs in a lot with ease: the sexual revolution, inherited addiction, the quasi-ecstatic allure of self-sabotage when there is nothing else left to do. But for all the excellent acting, including Rosy McEwan, testing Mary's adulterous sexual freedom as a newly married 20-something, and Eleanor Worthington-Cox and Matilda the Musical 's Alisha Weir as the youngest Marys, I felt I was watching an idea of a woman rather than a real one.
Until Nov 1
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