Oh, Mary

Watching Oh, Mary! is like wandering into a respectable historical museum and discovering someone has replaced the audio guide with a flask of gin and a kazoo. It bills itself as a play about Mary Todd Lincoln, but that is rather like saying the Great Fire of London was a particularly warm time of the year. Cole Escola’s riotous comedy is not interested in history as much as it is interested in detonating it, then dancing in the crater.

Mason Alexander Park plays Mary Lincoln Todd (a role originally played by Escola) as a thwarted cabaret star trapped in the body of a First Lady, a woman for whom the Civil War is a confusing and annoying scheduling conflict. While her husband is overseeing offensive manoeuvres against the Confederates, she rattles around the White House looking for whiskey and asking him “What South?”

Being a frustrated cabaret performer, Mary wants attention, applause and alcohol, though not always in that order. Park’s performance is ferociously funny, balancing narcissism, despair and vaudevillian physical comedy with the precision of someone who knows exactly where the laugh is and how hard to kick it.

Sam Pinkleton’s direction understands that farce, like politics, works best when it commits fully to bad ideas at high speed. The staging keeps the action tight and the jokes relentless, never allowing the audience time to ask sensible questions such as “Why is this happening?” or “Is this allowed?” Giles Terrera is luxury casting and is a marvel of weary understatement as Abe, the Great Emancipator reduced to a put-upon husband trying to hold the nation together and his secret desires secret while his wife is auditioning for stardom.

As Mary’s much-maligned chaperone Kate O’Donnell who, when not being thrown down the stairs by her charge, is revealing just which sensation she most enjoys about ice cream (and it’s not the taste). Dino Fetscher plays the tutor-with-an-agenda called in to help give Mary’s stage ambitions an outlet, all the while plotting something else entirely.

Historically, the show is nonsense. Thematically, it is razor sharp. Beneath the wigs and wisecracks sits a pointed examination of American myth-making and the small, irritating fact that women in history are often expected to suffer quietly while men become marble statues. Mary’s complaint that she has been sidelined by history is both absurd and oddly persuasive, which is where the show does its cleverest work.

There will be some (chiefly theatre critics) who will deride this work as “dated” based on its similarities to what was seen on stage in the early twentieth century and on TV a few decades later. I’ll take that criticism when they cease referring to any and every one of Shakespeare’s 400-year-old works as “timely” or “timeless” (pick a lane: it can’t be both).

Some, whose only close brush with cabaret is most likely Cabaret, will take issue with the vaudevillian vibe and wonder why Oh, Mary is taking up space in a West End venue and not some music hall out in the sticks. To which I say: heaven forbid theatre can make solid sociopolitical points and entertain at the same time.

This is not a reverent evening at the theatre. It is a loud, brash, slightly drunken argument with the past, conducted in hoop skirts and high heels and to an imaginary spotlight. If you believe history should be respected, you may be appalled. If you believe it should occasionally be tickled mercilessly until it says something untoward, Oh, Mary! is your kind of show. You’ll learn less about the Civil War and rather more about ego, marriage and Escola’s talent for turning trauma into entertainment. Which, come to think of it, is history too.


Oh, Mary is currently booking at Trafalgar Square until 25 April.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan