Testament

Project Arts Centre ****

WE ENTER a space that is at once strange and familiar – following an earthen path, against the evening song of cicadas, into a home that accepts us like a congregation. We are also intimately well-acquainted with the speaker of Colm Tóibín’s monologue, yet here she is changed utterly; a mother who has lost her son – to politics, to symbolism, to violence – a woman whose bowed, covered head we recognise from countless baby-blue portraits, whose suffering we remember in marble.

The remarkable ambition of this co-production between Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival and Landmark Productions is to make Mary, mother of God, flesh. Twenty years ago, without a hint of the profane, it would have been picketed, perhaps banned, for daring to put words and dissenting thoughts into the mouths of icons. A beautiful piece of writing, if a confused piece of theatre, the most significant thing about

Testament

is that it exists. Even in a nation whose artists have long questioned or subverted the teachings of the church, and whose people reappraise religious authority in both sorrow and anger, there is a real frisson in Tóibín’s creative right to reply.

In the shape of Marie Mullen, perhaps the only actor who could make these words resonate with such commanding, unlaboured force, the theatrical challenge is to give a voice to those marginalised by “official” reports (her “guardians” are editing her accounts into the founding dogma of Christianity) without simply inscribing biblical marginalia. Tóibín and director Garry Hynes are partly successful. Mary’s Jerusalem is a tumultuous cradle of revolution; another society in terrifying, exhilarating flux, awaiting an uprising against “everything we have known before, including death itself”. Tóibín’s text, subtly and strikingly poetic, gives reeling detail to male cruelty, the imperatives of propaganda and a woman’s resistance. But while the resurrection of Lazarus is stunningly repositioned, Christ’s “passion” is only embellished, not transformed, and while Tóibín would restore breath to virgin mothers and plaster saints, he retreats from making direct contradiction.

There is no escape from established symbolism, as the Caravaggio shadows of Peter Mumford’s lights remind you, spreading across Francis O’Connor’s sombre set. That’s why Hynes, as helplessly in thrall to Christian imagery as we are, has Mullen adopt the crucifixion pose, a showy theatrical manoeuvre at odds with Tóibín’s largely realistic detail. (Even he will give us a pieta, though.)

Mullen almost falters a couple of times under the sheer weight of text (although never leaden, its density makes few concessions to performance), but she too is stranded somewhere between flesh and symbol.

Tóibín’s ending, gently defiant, is not quite as stirring as his own performance, or indeed ours: absorbing the still-revolutionary notion that we must take these disputed testaments, these discredited instruments, and make them our own.

Runs until October 16th