Theatre review Sarandon shines in a slippery study of self

If there is something familiar about a play comprising disparate scenes from one woman's life, performed by five different actors, that is because it was the central conceit of Annie Ernaux's book The Years, adapted for stage last year.

- Arifa Akbar

Mary Page Marlowe premiered before that, in 2016, and takes similar shape. There are 11 scenes, non-chronological, that travel 70 years around the life of Mary Page Marlowe, an accountant, wife to three husbands, mother to two children and daughter of an alcoholic, who becomes perilously dependent on drink herself. She too is portrayed by five actors (and a doll).

Comparison between the plays might be unfair - they form cubist portraits of two very different women, living in separate continents and times - yet one casts a shadow over the other. This play by the Pulitzer prizewinning American playwright Tracy Letts has many searing scenes and is highly watchable, with excellent dialogue, but it is not quite so polyphonic or as whole.