Mary Said What She Said

This report on a current work by Robert Wilson, will hardly come as a surprise to long-time readers of European Stages or its precedent journal, Western European Stages.  Wilson’s work was noted in the first issue of WES (Fall, 1989) and the following issue contained not only a full essay on his recent work in Germany, but also a complete chronology of upcoming Wilson productions.  Since then Wilson has been one of the artists most frequently mentioned in both journals, and although he was born in America, he has created the majority of his many works in Europe, as is the case with Mary Said What She Said.  First presented at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris in 1919 and subsequently in Vienna, Amsterdam, Florence, Hamburg and South Korea.  The work finally appeared at the Skirball Center in New York in March 2025.  Its success has been great everywhere and in New York, the five productions at the 850 seat Skirball were totally sold out.

When the audience entered the theatre, they found the proscenium filled with the representation of an elegantly draped traditional red theatre curtain, with a rather odd addition, an ornately framed image high in the center, perhaps three by four feet, containing a continuously running black and white film loop of a small English bulldog chasing its tail and then pausing to look at the camera and be temporarily replaced by the silent film type title “You fool me.  I am not too smart.” Carousel type music, seemingly unrelated to the Philip Glass type score for the rest of the production, composed by Ludovico Einaudi, accompanied this introduction, which did not actually begin until almost fifteen minutes after the announced curtain time.  The scene occupied most of the audience’s attention for a strangely long time.  Apparently, most reviewers found it as incomprehensible as I did, because I found it mentioned in only one report, that of Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Times, who boldly suggested the dog’s action represented the obsessiveness of Mary Stuart as a character, which to be honest makes as little sense to me as the dog does.

Thankfully, the production contains few other interpellations of this sort but takes us into familiar Wilson territory.  Wilson has worked with leading actress Isabel Huppert before, most notably in 1989 when they created a structurally and visually similar staging of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, with a performance text created by Darryl Pinckney, who also created the text for Mary Said, as well as for several other Wilson creations.  The Mary text, like others by Pinckney, is extremely demanding, with frequent echoes and repetitions, text clusters, and unconventional arrangements of material. Rather than attempt to make the text more accessible, Huppert has done quite the opposite, employing the incredible range of her voice to constantly vary the pitch, volume, speed and intensity other lines.  A common pattern is for her to begin a sequence in silence and then gradually increase the speech and intensity of her speech until she is pouring out upon a stunned audience an avalanche of verbal material, sometimes interspersed with strangled chocks and laughter or half-intelligible cries. This common pattern though is subject to infinite variation, resulting in as dazzling a display of linguistic virtuosity as I have ever seen on stage.   From time to time this already mixed text is further complicated by laughter, cries and phrases apparently re-recorded by Huppert and now projected on top of or alongside her live voice from various locations in the auditorium.  Of course, this means that early into the production even French-speaking audiences realize that they are not going to be able to follow the text, but must simply let it wash over them, relying upon key words and frequent repetitions to provide what orientation they need.

English speakers are even more challenged, despite the presumed aids of English supertitles above and to both sides of the stage.  The normal problems of such devices are always present—the impossibility of accurately coordinating even moderately faithful translations with the timing and rhythms of stage speech and the necessity of focusing away from the stage action to read the translation—but here both problems are exaggerated.  The complex text of Pinckney and explosive delivery of Huppert guarantee that the projected texts often flash by too quickly to be read and in any case often have no relation to the spoken one.  In addition, the intensely bright Wilson backdrops overpower the relatively dim projected texts except in the rare blackout scenes.

Wilson’s settings tend toward the minimalistic, and that is especially the case here.  Aside from Mary herself (and at one point a silhouetted double of her upstage) the stage is totally devoid of scenery, consisting only of a large rectangular background, almost always divided into three blending layers, the middle one tending toward white, the upper and lower ones normally some shade of blue or grey, the hue often changing but the brightness fairly consistent except for complete backouts.  Two narrow bands of horizontal white light complete the stage picture one running across the stage below the backscreen, the other at the front of the stage, about where footlights would be located, if used.  The only object which appears other than the queen is a white Cinderella-type slipper which she picks up from the floor and briefly examines before discarding it.  This being a Wilson production, it is picked out by a distinctive Wilsonian white mini spotlight as Huppert holds it up.   Similar accents, virtually a trademark of Wilson’s theatre, are elsewhere used to pick out one of Huppert’s outstretched and posed hands or her enormously expressive face.  The first such facial accent comes almost twenty minutes into this ninety-minute production and is particularly striking because up until that point Huppert has remained largely motionless as a striking black silhouette upstage center.  The sudden focus upon her flowing white face and especially her brilliantly red outlined mouth created an impression remarkably like that of Beckett’s powerful Not I, which I had recently witnessed at the Irish Repertory.  An even more striking visual echo occurred soon after, when Huppert’s expressive visage, now twisted in anger, for a brief and unique moment, turns green.  For a New York audience at least, she momentarily became the wicked witch of the popular theatre and film.     Huppert’s simple but elegant Renaissance costume, with flowing gown and puff should sleeves (designed by Jacques Reynaud) serves as a kind of ornate visual pedestal to her constantly changing face.  Thie gown is so dark that even when she is in full light there is a suggestion of a silhouette.  Around her neck, however, she wears an ornate lace collar which, especially when the tight spot is focused on her face, gives the appropriate if chilling impression of a severed head.

Huppert’s physical movements are far more restricted than her voice, and are often mechanical, even puppet-like, especially in the closing moments which suggest a slow and stylized period dance.  Her first movement, from her long held post up center diagonally to far downstage right, is done so slowly and gradually that she seems to glide almost imperceptibly to this new position.  As the evening progresses, however, she repeats this same downward cross, almost mechanically but it a very wide variety of ways, often quite frantically with slashing movements of her arms.  These are also the sequences which are delivered with the most verbal force.

The final fifteen minutes or so of the production are a series of brief scenes recapitulating, with slight variations, previous sequences, with one notable exception, which seems, like the dog clip in the opening sequence, to have dropped in from some other production.  For the only time in the evening, the figure of Mary almost disappears, covered by a rolling cloud of stage smoke, while the action is carried on by three projected recorded voices.  One is apparently Huppert’s, listing a series of historical names (all martyrs?), another is an American voice, perhaps Wilson’s, who repeats slowly and deliberately a series of short phrases in English, primarily “I am NOT not here.”  A French child’s voice then apparently attempts to repeat the phases in French.  A colleague helpfully suggested to me that this scene was meant to suggest Many’s concern with his son being forced to learn English.   This certainly gives the scene more justification than the dog video and occasional other seemingly gratuitous directorial touches, but I still found the production essentially a memorable showcase of the formidable talents of one of the world’s greatest living actresses.