HAIL MARYS

Susan Sarandon and Andrea Riseborough are among five actors portraying the life story of an enigmatic, hard-drinking woman in 'Mary Page Marlowe', writes Alice Savile

- Alice Savile

Old Vic, London

A formidable army of female talent has gone into the Old Vic’s staging of Mary Page Marlowe, a 2016 play by American writer Tracy Letts (August: Osage County) that’s very loosely inspired by his late mother's life story. This enigmatic, hard-drinking woman is played by no fewer than five actors, including both Andrea Riseborough (who brilliantly embodied another alcoholic in the 2022 film To Leslie) and a 79-year-old Susan Sarandon making her belated London stage debut.

To be a woman is to play a part, we're told. And if all these bodies somehow fail to fit together into a single living, breathing portrait of an actual person, each still brings some brilliance of its own to this fractured story.

Sarandon has a winning spikiness and naughtiness as Mary Page's oldest incarnation. She might not be able to work her telly, but she's not too old to snog her third husband, or tease the nurse for having too many kids. There are only odd little hints to her past a sense of her isolation, or of previous pain.