Mary Said What She Said played 4 shows at London’s Barbican Theater last week to sold-out houses and to wide acclaim. Many thanks to everyone who helped make this tour such a success!
“This is a complex meditation on divine right, betrayal and mortality ... Huppert ... holds herself like a young ballerina. ... Wilson and Pinckney sift and intensify her experience, reinforcing it through strangeness and repetition. It’s a demanding but rewarding watch: a tour de force performance by Huppert, and a rare chance to catch Wilson’s work in the UK.”
“Huppert is astounding: her delivery mesmerising, her movement precise, her gaze unblinking, her presence riveting. A tough, unique piece of work.”
“The paradox of a queen who was also a political pawn is captured with breathtaking ferocity by ... Isabelle Huppert [in a] 90-minute tour de force ... The text, by Darryl Pinckney, is directed by Robert Wilson more like a libretto than a play, its tempi slowing and accelerating to tongue-twisting speed, in counterpoint with a lush orchestral score from Ludovico Einaudi. ... This show will not be to everyone’s taste, but for fans of Wilson and the magnificent Huppert, it is a collector’s item.”
“This production ... resembles an act of defiance in keeping with the embattled fortitude of its benighted subject. ... Here is history in all its peculiar horror, lifted free of text-books and turned into a spectacle of existential suffering.”
“Robert Wilson’s production has a curious power to bridge gaps between opposites. It is dense, Huppert fires words like a majestic barrage of bullets, but also light: Darryl Pinckney’s lyrical language is inflected with Tudor verse, flashes of Shakespeare, and cloaked in Beckettian existential angst.”
“On a mostly empty stage – except for one part where she is amidst the clouds; the ascension of Mary, perhaps – Huppert captivates as the frenzied queen, rushing towards the front of the stage, chopping the air with her hands, ... shouting out her words in a way that still remains elegant, bending to the music that continues throughout. Composer Ludovico Einaudi’s sweeping strings at the start give way to an orchestral version of house music where the drop never arrives. It makes for a thrilling, breathless conclusion for both Huppert and audience alike. In the opening 20 minutes or so, it seems as if Wilson’s show will drag on forever, but by the end one hopes it will never end.”
“One of the most galvanising, mesmerising, virtuoso performances I have ever been privileged to witness.”
Isabelle Huppert (Photograph © Lucie Jansch)