Mary Said What She Said at the Barbican with Isabelle Huppert – review

A piece by the great avant-garde American theatre director Robert Wilson always has its own distinctive flavour. He is not like anyone else in how he sees and shapes the world. Combine that with the extraordinary discipline and control of the French actress Isabelle Huppert and you have an event.

Mary Said What She Said is not quite a play, or quite a poem. It’s more like a piece of art, or a dance in multiple acts. Set to an atmospheric score by Ludovico Einaudi, it’s structured and formal yet also capable of producing strong, fierce emotion and even flashes of humour. It is an undoubted tour de force.

The first Mary of the title is Mary Queen of Scots, as embodied by Huppert, who first appears in silhouette, her stylised period costume and little ruff, stark against the light, a bright moonlike pool to one side of the muddy brownish backdrop. She stays frozen like that for an astonishingly long time, hands folded, as she begins to recount Mary’s story and that of the four other Marys who served her.

With infinitesimal steps, she begins to move forwards. The phrases of Darryl Pinckney’s script – in French with surtitles – are strung together with repeated passages that Huppert, both speaking on stage and recorded, gives particular sharp, rapid emphasis. As the monologue unfolds, the effect is hypnotic. The events of Mary’s life – from infant queen to marriage at 16 to the boy king of France, to her return to Scotland, rule and deposition, through her three marriages, and into nearly 20 years of imprisonment at the hands of Elizabeth I – are dealt with in fragments of memory. Pinckney quotes from her letters and prefigures her execution at the age of 44.

But all of this is bound together in a meditation on the existential loneliness of a woman seeking to define herself in a hostile environment, to leave her own legacy on a history that is being written by others.

It’s staged by Wilson like a masque, the words punctuated by sudden frozen moments when Huppert’s face is spotlit or turned a ghostly green. The lighting changes behind her from bright blue to white; at one moment of apotheosis, she sits in a cloud of dry ice as a child’s voice comes over the soundtrack.

She looks like a figure from Beckett, face chalk white, red mouth working as she spits out the words at rattle-gun speed. She moves like a dancer, fingers arching from her sides in elegant shapes. Towards the end, she moves back and forth on a diagonal, hips tilting, arms framing the air, gathering into a little punch of defiance. It’s an indelible image of endurance, of the simple desire to go on.

It’s technically astounding, but it’s also full of depth. There’s no false sentiment, but when she speaks of the son she never saw walk, there’s a catch of emotion and sense of something tugging her back.

The entire event is such a rare thing. It makes you long to see more of Wilson’s work in the UK – and glad to have seen Huppert shine so brightly on a stage. Her first UK role was as Mary Stewart opposite Anna Massey in Schiller’s masterpiece in 1996. She’s only briefly been back since. This feels like a wheel turning full circle, a welcoming back of one of the great performers of our age.