Director, set designer and lighting designer Robert Wilson professes an affinity with Samuel Beckett—I wrote that in a 2015 review of his Krapp’s Last Tape at the Barbican. And tonight I see Isabelle Huppert perform Mary Queen of Scots as if she were in a Beckett play—Not I (that red mouth, that rapid fire delivery with hardly a breath taken) and Lucky’s monologue in Waiting for Godot (those flailing arms), perhaps.
What a fearless tour de force performance—one expects no less from Huppert. An unbroken ninety minutes in French, with English surtitles bravely trying to keep up with the text. But can the audience? I just about do, my university French of little help, but eyes have to take in stage creativity and text, divided loyalties. No matter. In bright light and shadows, a queen performs a self-justification. In artificial absurdist style. It has to be seen, this manifestation of amour propre. “I am holy”. She will not ask for pardon.
It’s a quartet really, not a solo: she carries the weight of textual memory, but Ludovico Einaudi’s dramatic mood music, Darryl Pinckney’s clever circular text and Wilson’s lighting, his concept, are equal players. But what a rambling weight of memory, as she faces death, her “dance of death”: backwards and forwards, folding in on itself, chunks repeated and repeated. Voiceovers play in her head: a character in her own fiction. Her laugh is shrill.
And what a past—we must know the basic outline, so much has been written and produced about Mary’s vicissitudes: her early marriage to the dauphin, her year as queen of France, her marriages, political and religious plots, assassinations and her incarceration for about nineteen years, her claim to the English throne.
Wilson makes her a posing marionette, a slave to her version of the past. Lighting is his forte and art—he is the reason I took a lighting course many years ago, to understand how he paints with light. Light changes from white to blue to grey, light phenomena play across the screen—are we in outer space? Or are they pre-death hallucinations? He illuminates an ageless actress still in her prime.
In period dress (costume Jacques Reynaud), her back to the audience, an isolated silhouette against a glaring white-lit back-screen. Slowly turning, moving imperceptibly forward, her face lit alabaster white, she is a marble statue already. High collar holding her head erect—the head that will shortly be taken off her shoulders—she is entitled, self-righteous, arrogant, justifying her life. Who better than la reine Huppert to take on this demanding role…
The voices give her respite from her monologue, but she has total command of the stage, though there is a silent doppelganger slowly moving across the light at the back. A white shoe triggers a memory; she burns a letter. Ah, letters, this is what it is about. Her casket letters—were they real or fake or adulterated? Fifty-seven letters written in prison were decoded last year.
Her four Mary maids of honour, Seton, Beaton (incidentally whose handwriting was similar to the Queen’s), Fleming and Livingstone were real—is that what the title means, but which one? I’m not keeping up. Did they gossip, spill the beans?
Is she dead already? Is she in purgatory—one boxed-in scene is full of white dry ice—is she already in heaven? Preparing to die, this is her last will and testament—she is going down fighting. She is not pleading guilty. She is vociferous about her cousin, queen Elizabeth: that “painted virgin queen who left no trace”. Whereas she will never see her baby son walk… this is so personal.
Mary Said What She Said is poetic, epic, kinetic, an intriguing art installation, but it’s not dance. The movement choreography leaves a lot to be desired. Mary’s arms move stiffly in strange semaphore—makes me think she is already in her coffin or sleepwalking. I don't warm to it. Her circular walking, pacing her cell, reflects the circular writing.
A dog chasing its own tail is the metaphor for her life—for our lives. This is what we have to keep us entertained whilst we wait for the show to begin, a film of a dog in a gilt frame on plush, gold-trimmed stage curtains. It is captioned: “You Fool me. I’m not too smart.” Interpret that.
First seen at the Théâtre de la Ville-Paris last year, this is its UK première. In a “three-part monologue of eighty-six paragraphs”—the digital (I know it is money-saving but how one misses hard copies) programme tells us—“memory open my heart”—there you have it, her drama of her eventful life. But what is truth, what fiction, we are all figments of our imaginations. History is constantly rewritten. “In my end is my beginning”—how right she is, still a fascinating subject for creative exploration.