Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary at the STC: a mother’s tongue

Colm Toibin’s stage drama about the Virgin Mary gives provocative voice to a woman silenced for 2000 years.

Alison Whyte in the Sydney Theatre Company’s The Testament of Mary. Picture: James Green

I gasped when I saw the cross. They had it ready, waiting for him. ... He was the boy I had given birth to and he was more defenceless than he had been then ... For the nailing part, we stood back. Each of the nails was longer than my hand ... I tried to see his face as he screamed in pain, but it was so contorted in agony and covered in blood that I saw no one I recognised. It was the voice I recognised, the sounds he made that belonged only to him. ... I moved from thinking I could do something to realising that I could not ... Thoughts of him as a baby, as a part of my flesh, his heart having grown from my heart.

This is from the gospel that does not exist in the Christian canon, that of the Virgin Mary. It comes to life, raw, anguished, angry and daringly human, in Colm Toibin’s Man Booker Prize shortlisted 2012 novel The Testament of Mary. The book had its origins in a short play, Testament, the Irish author wrote for the 2011 Dublin Theatre Festival.

After the success of the novel he worked further on the play. Renamed The Testament of Mary, it went to Broadway, a one-woman monologue starring Irish actress Fiona Shaw. It attracted a Tony Award nomination, as well as Christian protests.

Irish author and playwright Colm Toibin. Picture: Getty Images

In the 80-minute drama, Mary, silent for 2000 years, reveals her story, one that means she must speak “difficult truths’’. It will have its Australian debut next week at the Sydney Theatre Company, directed by Imara Savage and with Alison Whyte in the lead — and only — role. The play will also be staged at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre in November, with Pamela Rabe as the woman from Nazareth.

Toibin, 61, grew up Catholic. As a boy, each night’s rosary ended with Hail Holy Queen. He still cherishes the lines, “To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” So the book and the play come from belief and respect, but he knows there’s no universal amen for his decision to turn the sainted immaculate virgin into an ordinary woman, a mother who does not think her son needs to die, for anyone, any reason or any belief.

“I am serious. I am not involved in mockery. I want people to believe me,’’ he says in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he lives and teaches for part of the year.

“This is an important question. Within Catholic dogma people believe Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven. She is the Queen of Heaven and has a very particular place in prayer and belief.’’

At this point in our conversation, something happens that feels, well, semi-divine. We are talking via Skype, so can see each other. Suddenly light streams in through Toibin’s venetian blinds. He leaves his chair, closes them and then sits down and continues.

“She didn’t always have that place,’’ he says of Mary. “She was upgraded, as it were, and the iconography could begin. She was created in statues and paintings, very powerful ones, of the grieving mother.

“I am interested in the human, secular ele­ment of this, in what it would have been like for her. I know that to some extent this is playing with fire, but if we don’t do this as writers, what is the point? Otherwise we are just about entertainment, and I am not interested in that.’’

The crucifixion of Christ has absorbed filmmakers from Cecil B. DeMille (The King of Kings, 1927) to George Stevens (The Greatest Story Ever Told, 1965) to Martin Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988) to Mel Gibson (The Passion of the Christ, 2004).

But telling the story in Mary’s voice, bringing it out of her heart and mind, is rare, and Toibin does it with unflinching candour. This mortal woman may rise to heaven one day, but right now she is down to earth. “I am interested in hitting the secret spirit with the drama of this,’’ Toibin says.

Toibin spent time in Ephesus, once in Greece but now in Turkey, where Mary was said to live, and perhaps die. He wrote some of her story there. A core element is her defiance of two visitors — unnamed but probably disciples Paul and John — who want her to co-operate with them as they start to record the world-redeeming, humankind-saving life of her son, the Messiah.

She looks at the two men with contempt, describes them as “hungry and rough” and “too locked into their vast and insatiable needs’’. One of them, who was there at the foot of the cross at Golgotha, now scowls at her when “the story I tell him does not stretch to whatever limits he has ordained’’.

Michelangelo's Pieta (Mercy) in the Vatican. Picture: AP

The crucifixion scenes are brutal. Mary is where only John puts her in the gospels: up close, at her son’s side. She does something unexpected.

Later she talks about holding her broken son in her arms, but it is the recollection of a dream. When she talks about her love of the Sabbath, she remembers the blissful time when her son was eight or nine. She remembers watching him and his father, her husband, walking together. Her take on purported miracles is sceptical, to say the least. She thinks her son should avoid his friends — and live.

“This is about the idea of the personal sacrifice of an individual, chosen by a group,’’ Toi­bin says. “It’s about the idea that no cause is worth that particular individual sacrifice.’’

This all-too-human Mary caused some trouble for Toibin in the US. Christian groups protested outside the theatre and an emergency plan was drawn up for an evacuation. The latter was not needed. The author also received hostile emails. This Mary, he was told, was a blasphemy.

Toibin suggests any perceived sacrilege on his part is due to imagination, not intent.

“I am interested in finding the humanity of the character who has become iconic, giving a voice to someone who has been mainly silent,’’ he says. “I am aware, of course, that people revere the icon and pray to Mary and fill her silences themselves. So it is not a simple matter.’’

This secularisation of a holy figure also troubled Scorsese in his film version of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel. His Jesus (Willem Dafoe) struggles with various forms of temptation, including lust. He imagines an ordinary life, with sex, with Mary Magdalene. A screening in Paris was firebombed, injuring 13 people. The film was banned in several countries.

Stevens grappled with this challenge in his film, too. He cast as Jesus the Swedish actor Max von Sydow, in his first English film role, because he wanted someone people would not recognise. Gibson stuck to the Bible, in a bloody and box-office record way ($US600 million, the highest for an R-rated film).

The story the disciples wrote became the holy word. It changed the world. Toibin says he used to believe in it but now he does not. He wants to explore the gaps between their story and what happened at the time, and also the places the two versions meet.

An author interested in the power of silence, he is passionate about letting Mary speak. He hopes audiences will be on her side. He remembers seeing a production in Spain, for example, where theatregoers were “grief stricken ... and with her’’.

“Maybe this woman has not spoken before,’’ he says, “and maybe this story is new to her in the telling.’’

It’s the suggestion that this is Mary’s first telling of a long withheld — and long reinvented — story that brings such imaginative dazzle, and risk, to the book and play.

When I ask, because he’s in the US, if he sees any connection between his story of a woman’s disempowerment and the rise of ­Donald Trump, he slams the incoming American president but chooses different contemporary comparisons.

Trump did win, he agrees, because of a loss of faith — in the political system — but he had power and, most importantly, a voice. It’s the lack of a voice that reduces someone to powerlessness. “Think of some person in Manus Island [detention centre], off Australia,’’ Toibin says. “If they spoke, what would we hear?’’

He continues, speaking of Mary and the real and imagined women he thought of when writing the play, “The voice is all power, but it is the powerlessness that causes the voice to have such power.’’

Toibin says one inspiration was the South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, who died in 2014. He spent time with her and admired her “brave and articulate” opposition to apartheid. Other influences include poet Sylvia Plath — “I found in her the idea of a difficult truth to be spoken” — Joan of Arc and Greek mythological characters Electra, Medea and Antigone. As it happens, Toibin’s next novel, H ouse of Names, visits the cursed House of Atreus from Greek mythology.

Toibin says when he was working on the play with theatre people, “we all asked what part of ourselves were we using in the making of this. All of us had suffered loss and that became what we were dealing with, the trauma of loss and grief.’’ But, he adds, turning his thoughts to Mary, “the voice came out as her voice”.

Of course, “her” voice will come from the mouth of an actress on stage for an hour and 20 minutes. Toibin appreciates the challenge he has set. The longest single speech in Shakespeare, by way of comparison, comes from Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet: 43 lines.

“It’s a lonely business,’’ he says. “Doing it as a monologue means it’s just you with the audience. There are no prompts for starters, as there are no other actors.

“And once it’s over you can’t go to the dressing rooms and have a drink and talk it over with the other actors, in that generous way they have, because there’s no one else there who experienced what you did. You are on your own on stage, and afterwards.’’

The writer, in contrast, finds theatre a sociable and fun experience.

“It sure beats a reading tour,’’ he says with a laugh. “I had to walk into the city to work with theatre people, rather than stay in my room to write a novel, and there was a social scene as well. On Fridays we’d all go for a drink! There is a much different feel to it than writing a novel, and I was fascinated by it.’’

Toibin hopes Australian audiences will feel for Mary. She is not an easy woman. She has seen what no mother should. She is bereft. She will never run out of tears. She almost can’t believe it. Her thoughts and behaviour may stretch our beliefs, too.

“In order for there to be faith,” Toibin says, “there has to be doubt. Has anyone ever said otherwise?”

The Testament of Mary, by Colm Toibin, is at the Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf Theatre from January 13.