The Testament of Mary

Play (2013)
by Colm Tóibín

Featuring Paula Langton

There’s enormous power and intrigue in this compellingly written and acted account of what Jesus’ real mother might have said about his death had she been given the opportunity.

The narrative follows a quite direct route, essentially giving Mary’s impression of Jesus’ followers – not a very positive one – and of the course of her travels on the day of his crucifixion.

Parting from traditional accounts, she tells of having to leave the scene and scurry away in order to avoid getting into further trouble with the authorities. She relates this part of the story with some degree of guilt, wishing it could have been different.

Multiple embellishments of character and scene gives her account a distinctive and amplified sense of context. Various mythic figures emerge – a maid with whom Mary goes to the Temple of Artemis, and a cousin, Marcus, who guides her to and away from the scene of Jesus’ final hours.

Mary’s suspicion of Jesus’ followers proceeds from a curious initial awareness of their collective oddity to a deep questioning of their motives after the death of her son. Seeing in them an overly robust interest in promoting Jesus’ divinity after his death, their efforts to do so turn her off completely. All of their talk of his being the son of God and being resurrected strikes her as the transformation of what she regards as a beautifully poetic dream into a professed doctrine. She can accept the dream, but it is very difficult for her to swallow its transformation into ideology.

Telling the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead at some length provides an inroad into her perspective which appreciates Jesus as a wonderfully compassionate man but not the miracle worker described by his followers.

Though Tóibín’s Mary doesn’t explicitly contradict the notion of the immaculate conception, she provides, alternatively, enough of a sense of an ordinary connection with her husband to call it into question.

An Irish author, Tóibín has recently become well known for the novel Brooklyn (2009) about a young Irish woman emigrating to New York in the early 1950s which served as the basis for the current and popular film of the same name.

An evocative writer, Tóibín has, in The Testament of Mary, created a vivid and interestingly humanistic account of the death of Jesus, one that calls to mind other vividly down-to-earth treatments, like that given in Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ (1955).

Oddly, however, given Tóibín’s humanistic stance, there is little mention of Jesus’ or Mary’s Jewishness, except in the most cursory way (in one passing reference to a synagogue). References to the Temple are also oddly ambiguous, referring most often to a temple of the Greek goddess Artemis where Mary’s servant worships rather than to The Temple in Jerusalem which lay at the center of Jewish life.

The strangely non-contextual and not realistic depiction of Mary, a Jew, as one who would seek solace in a forbidden polytheistic religion seems quite out of place here. Tóibín seems to want to provide the sense of a female deity as relevant and appropriate to the terrestrial inclinations of his protagonist, but it does not quite work. If one is writing a humanistic account of the death of Jesus and is going to be true to the life and orientation of his mother, accounting more authentically for her Jewishness would make considerably more narrative sense.

With that qualification, the play, otherwise, is coherently written and presents a quite reasonably articulated perspective on a story which one knows so well through its liturgical foundations. Told from the perspective of family, the play is curiously analogous to The Mother of The Maid by Jane Anderson. an interestingly parallel account of the life of Joan of Arc as seen through the eyes of her parents, produced this past summer at Shakespeare & Company. Both plays make their divinely inspired heroes palpable in a new way, not lessened by their humane contexts but given color and vitality in the way only a parent’s telling can afford.

Paula Langton’s account of Mary is gripping and intense throughout.

A soundscape designed by Dewey Dellay offers a varied and interestingly subliminal frame for the narrative enabling it to achieve a varied shape during the play’s uninterrupted ninety-five minutes.

– BADMan