Oh, Mary! review – there is nothing else like it in the West End

I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite like Oh, Mary!. And that’s an entirely good thing. Created by playwright Cole Escola, and starring Mason Alexander Park, it arrives from Broadway bearing two Tony Awards and the kind of buzz that propelled Hamilton across the Atlantic.

Any resemblance to that juggernaut of historical revisionism ends there. Oh, Mary! is a gleaming black comedy about former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln. It’s silly, irreverent, and utterly irresistible, full of shocks and surprises.

The nature of its difference makes it difficult to write about. It would be a shame to give too much away because that might stop the laughter that rises at multiple moments. One gag is executed so swiftly and so beautifully that you can hardly believe what you are seeing.

Suffice it to say then that this is Mary Todd Lincoln as you’ve never seen her before. Not a shy retiring woman, who was often bedridden and depressed, but a loud-mouthed, coarse drunk, roaming the constricting rooms of the White House (designed with dolls house sophistication by the design collective dots with costumes by Holly Pierson) like a caged tiger. Except that caged tigers don’t drink their own vomit for an alcoholic hit.

Mary is driving her husband (Giles Terera) insane, as he tries to win the Civil War against the South.  “The South of where?”, she repeatedly asks. What she wants is to be on stage, in cabaret. “How would it look for the first lady of the United States to be flitting round the stage right now in the ruins of war?” he tells her. “How would it look?,” she replies. “Sensational!”

Park’s timing of that line, with an eye rolling pause between the first half of the sentence and the second, sums up the tone of the play and their brilliantly funny performance. They romp around the stage, hoop skirt and ringlets flying, utterly dominating the action with their sardonic delivery and narcissistic demands.

Given a half-chance by her husband, who seems to find his male assistant rather more fetching than his wife, Mary flings herself into acting lessons with a glamorous acting teacher, who she likes rather better than the companion her husband has provided, whom she has recently attacked. “Why would I fling a grown woman down the stairs?” Pause. “Because it is hilarious.”

There is a sliver pathos in Mary as she convinces herself, melodramatically, that she is in love and is about to be a stage success which Park allows to emerge. If you squint hard and at a distance, then there might be a sense that the play is examining the frustration of people who are neglected. But not really. This is a piece almost entirely without sub-text, a celebration of the camp, queer humour that Escola has made their own.

It’s also a wonderful example of physical theatre, with director Sam Pinkleton controlling each joke, each vigorous movement and every gesture with absolute precision.

This 80-minutes of perfectly judged silliness won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it isn’t meant to be. It is absolutely and uniquely itself, an irreverent, counter historical delight, and a perfect expansion of my favourite joke. “But other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?”