Stoning Mary ( Archived )

Reviews

Michael Billington, The Guardian, April 6 2005

Tucker Green interweaves three apparently discrete stories. One involves an AIDS-afflicted husband and wife who can afford one life-saving prescription between them. A second story has middle-aged parents endlessly wrangling over teenager soldier son.

The third segment deals with a woman visit to her imprisoned sister awaiting death by stoning. Only at the end of this highly-wrought 60-minute piece does Tucker Green plait the strands to show their tragic connection.

You can see what Tucker Green is trying to do: shock us into new awareness by transposing three putative third stories into a white culture. In that sense, she follows in the path of Kane’s Blasted and Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes, which imported civil war and fascist horror into an English setting.

What Tucker Green does have is a linguistic gift. At some points I was reminded of the choreo-poems of the African-American Ntozake Shange, at others of T.S. Eliot Sweeney Agonistes.

As she’s shown before, Tucker Green has a strong ear for the sounds of domestic strife: best of all are the riffs between the soldier parents where the husband uses his wife’s cheap scent as a form of vindictive triumph.

Elliott stages the piece adroitly with the actors marooned in quarrelling groups on Ultz’s set. Alan Williams and Ruth Sheen as the griping parents, Emily Joyce and Peter Sullivan as the desperate couple with AIDS, Claire Rushbrook and Claire-Louise Cordwell as the soured siblings all do good work.

Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, April 6 2005.

This new playwright takes two of the many ghastly things happening today in Africa- child soldiers and shortages of AIDS drugs- and sets them in modern Britain.

How would we Brits cope if our children became panga-wielding militia bullies?

What would white, working-class, English husbands and wives do if both had AIDS yet there were pills enough for only one? It is a chilling idea and makes Stoning Mary a theatrical event that brands the conscience as firmly as any hot rod on goatskin.

The best scenes see Ruth Sheen and Alan Williams playing the child soldier parents, torn between love, relief that he is back, and despair at what he has become.

The Mary of the title (Claire-Louise Cordwell) is a girl who dares to revenge her parents.

Stoning Mary is not pretty. It is not easy. But it will wind you with its punch.

??Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard, April 6, 2005.

Debbie Tucker Green stipulates that her extraordinary Stoning Mary should be set in the country of its performance and that all the characters are white. Yet the neon-lit inscription “AIDS genocide. The prescription,” heralds the action and floats from the stage floor to the backwall. These scene-setting words are redolent of Africa, where the Pope anathematising of the condoms that usually stop transmission of HIV has helped the epidemic assume nightmare proportions.

Miss Tucker’s papal attack is all the fiercer for being implicit, a matter of inference rather than any direct accusation. Characters, all of whom sound black although played by white actors, talk in a stylised patois of parched forcefulness, undermined by repetitiveness and obscurity. The startling idea, in counterpoise to Genet’s imaginative device in The Blacks, is apparently to jolt complacent, white consciousness. How better to make us empathise with blacks who endure AIDS without drug therapy in impoverished, lawless Africa than by playing them as white? Miss Tucker’s stratagem works unnervingly well.

The atmosphere is swathed in both calm and fury. Three sets of characters, lacking apparent connections, become thematically linked by murder and emotionally connected by their stoic acceptance of the awfulness of their lives. A husband and wife, presumably in the grip of AIDS, each also irritatingly represented by an actor voicing their unspoken thoughts, bicker over the single medical prescription they can afford: a child soldier wielding a machete appears and heightens their poignant sense of desperation. The soldier parents come to verbal blows over this dangerous youth while a young woman in custody for murder, awaiting what will be a death by stoning, voices her eloquent contempt for the “bitches” who refused to rally to her cause.

Emily Wife, Peter Sullivan Husband, Ruth Sheen son-adoring Mother and Claire-Louise Cordwell’s murderous Sister play with a rapt intensity.

Claire Allfree, Metro, April 7 2005

How would the West respond if the AIDS epidemic was happening in Europe, rather than in Africa? Or if a white girl was facing being stoned to death for murder? By counter-casting three apparently unconnected stories from a distant, lawless continent with white actors rather than black ones, Debbie Tucker Green follows the late Sarah Kane in bringing far-away atrocities into our own backyard.

A couple fighting over an AIDS prescription, too poor to afford another. A second scratch their heads over their guerrilla son, who is terrorising the neighbours with a machete. Mary, meanwhile, waits to see if women across the world have campaigned against the injustice of her sentence.

Against a hyper-stylised set, Marianne Elliotts cast speak Tucker Greens ghetto dialogue with white lower-class accents to powerfully disorientating effect. But the suspicion remains that Tucker Green has relied too heavily on a dramatic gimmick over a more deeply embedded argument to make her point about Western complacency.

Happily, there is enough human drama within her tightly-scripted vignettes to make the plays jagged poetry more than simply an exercise in tone and rhythm. The couple fighting for the prescription enact a terrible, ruthless battle of human need in which love has no place, while the eventual stoning of Mary (Claire-Louise Cordwell, pictured), which brings the three stories together, presents a bleak and powerfully resonant image of the brutalising consequences of revenge. Tucker Green is a challenging and deeply promising playwright and even if her work isn’t yet the finished article, it deserves to be seen.

Ian Johns, Times, April 7 2005

Modern age plagues brought centre stage

Language spattered like a machine gun in Debbie Tucker Greens last play, Born Bad, its mouthy black slang deployed in alliterative verbal punch-ups that left the audience as stunned as the dramas warring family members. It earned Tucker Green the Laurence Olivier Award for Most Promising Newcomer.

Her new play, Stoning Mary, using more rhythmic, fractured language, has three story strands that gradually connect. A husband and wife living with AIDS have reached breaking point as they struggle to afford medication. A middle-aged couple fight over the memory of their son, a machete-wilding soldier even though his voice has barely broken. A woman visits her younger sister, in custody for murder and about to be stoned to death.

We tend to associate these three situations, respectively entitled The AIDS Genocide: The Prescription, The Child Soldier and Stoning Mary, with Africa. Perhaps attacking our sense of detachment from these distant problems, Tucker Green brings them closer to home by giving them a white, British urban voice.

Its a striking set-up but its not developed by the punchy, elliptical dialogue. Scenes are often initially puzzling, the writing more like brutal tone poems than conversation.

Having actors as the AIDS couples egos expressing their real thoughts adds little and smacks of authorial contrivance. Its all more alienating than engaging.

Marianne Elliotts production is equally stylised. In the Royal Courts main house, the designer Ultz has replaced the stalls with a blue, horseshoe-shaped arena, where the actors, all having to be white according to the published script, are turned into remote figures choreographed almost like dancers. Its a neat, chic style but feels at odds with the horror and desperation of the stories before us.

That said, Elliott draws total conviction from an excellent ensemble, including Emily Joyce and Peter Sullivan as the AIDS-afflicted couple, Ruth Sheen and Alan Williams as the fractious parents, and Claire Rushbrook and Claire-Louise Cordwell as the alienated siblings.

Elliott pulls off a chilling conclusion as a British policeman cuts off the condemned womans hair before her punishment.

There are also moments when Tucker Green proves what a powerful, distinctive writer she can be, particularly when the child soldiers father rants about his wifes domineering scent, and the sister, facing death, wonders where all the bitches who love to talk, debate, curse and march have all gone.

Its when Tucker Greens verbal riffs start to individualise the speakers that the play begins to pack a real emotional punch.

But, continuing the Royal Courts current appetite for tackling big themes in oblique ways, the style and staging of Stoning Mary ultimately makes its concern easier, not harder, to ignore.

Alastair Macaulay, Financial Times, April 8, 2005

Elliott keeps rising towards the front rank of British directors, and her work on new plays at the Royal Court is only one area of her talent: almost no Noel Coward staging of the past 10 years has been as sharp and stylish as her Manchester Royal Exchange account of his Nude with Violin.

She shows us clearly all the real virtues of Greens writing: every repetition is musically expressive, superlatively judged in rhythmic terms. It is never easy to know just how to assess a directors contribution to a production, but one way is to feel how the play, like a piece of music, has been conducted. In Elliots work, the overall sense of tempo is brilliant, the structure lucid, and every word and every phrase make their point. And her sense of time connects to her grasp of space. For this production, the whole Royal Court Theatre Downstairs has been reorganised, so that the stage extends far into the stalls, with audience members downstairs standing round its perimeters. Mary is in the foreground, but there are scenes at the far end that register just as strongly.

Elliott persuades me that Green has serious talent; I want to see her stage Greens next play.