Mary supposes herself to have intimacy with her son she knows him better than he knows himself (she told him raising Lazarus was dangerous, he wouldn't listen). What is understood is the complexity of motherhood. Mary is a mother, and in Shaw's care, volubly Irish. This is a secular monologue, by the survivor of trauma. But she is not the blameless Mary of theology. What Tóibín has done is to give Mary a voice (she barely speaks in the Bible). This dramatisation of Colm Tóibín's Man Booker-shortlisted novel, The Testament of Mary, was a sell-out success in New York, yet had militant Christians on the streets, accusing it of blasphemy. Even if you had never heard of Jesus, you would say it all seemed likely to end badly.
There are nails on view and barbed wire, and Mel Mercier's music sounds like untuned machinery. At a stroke, typical of director Deborah Warner's authority, she has turned the audience into hapless pilgrims. The atmosphere is not of a miracle but of a troubling mistake. On a table, faintly typed words: "They said he was the son of God." And only then you might, through the crowds, glimpse Fiona Shaw's Mary inside a glass case, smiling – a living icon. It is, at first, too crowded to see what others see, and then you find yourself looking incredulously, at close range, into the unreadable eyes of a living vulture, shifting his black wings. B efore The Testament of Mary begins, the audience is invited up on to the stage.
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