Unable to bring herself to say the name of Jesus, she also is resistant to the disciples’ request for a simple factual account that meets their needs as authors of the Gospel, intent on establishing the martyrdom of the man they call the Son of God.

But the imagination and emotional impact of the narrative remain striking despite that shift.īoth the novel and the play start with the same words: “They appear more often now, both of them, and on every visit they seem more impatient with me and with the world.” Mary is speaking of her son’s followers, the keepers whose task is to record her recollections of the Crucifixion, the events leading up to it and those that followed. It imposes a level of artifice and intellectual distance on the exchange, particularly in Warner’s conceptualized presentation. But unlike the intimate relationship between reader and book, theater is a collective experience. On the page, when Mary sifts through events of the past and her own conflicted responses to them, it’s a mournful internalized dialogue. The stage treatment is different in that, inevitably, it sacrifices the mesmerizing quietness of the first-person narrator’s voice in the novella.

The play in its original version predates the book, performed at the 2011 Dublin Theatre Festival. Toibin published The Testament of Mary as a novella last year to major acclaim, and even by the elevated standards of this uncommonly gifted Irish writer, it’s a work of stunning directness, the austerity of its prose matched by its soul-piercing empathy. And like their last partnership on Broadway a decade ago with Medea, this play takes a figure from the ancient world, enshrouded in myth, and catapults her into modern times – or more accurately, into all time – as a flesh-and-blood woman. In Colm Toibin’s harrowing theatrical monologue, the stoical grace traditionally attributed to this most beloved figure in religious iconography is stripped away by degrees, exposing the raw pain and anger of an unforgiving mother grieving the senseless loss of her son.Ī dense, boldly unorthodox piece for risk-averse Broadway, it has been directed with transfixing focus by Deborah Warner, whose frequent collaborations with Shaw go back 25 years. Or possibly the live vulture perched nearby. Or the obsessive agitation with which she turns an apple in her left hand. Perhaps it’s the troubled intensity with which Shaw mutters unheard words to herself.

The testament of mary