Meryl Streep performs Colm Tóibín’s “beautiful and daring”* portrait of Mary, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Meryl Streep performs Colm Tóibín’s “beautiful and daring”* portrait of Mary, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
PROVOCATIVE, HAUNTING, AND INDELIBLE, Meryl Streep’s performance of Colm Tóibín’s acclaimed The Testament of Mary presents Mary as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity.
In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son’s crucifixion. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel. They are her keepers, providing her with food and shelter and visiting her regularly. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God; nor that his death was “worth it”; nor that the “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” were holy disciples.
Mary judges herself ruthlessly (she did not stay at the foot of the Cross until her son died–she fled, to save herself), and her judgement of others is equally harsh. This woman whom we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra of Medea or Antigone.
Brought to unforgettable life by three-time Academy Award-winner Meryl Streep, Tóibín’s tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.
*New York Times Book Review
A woman demanding to be heard In this short novel, Colm Tóibín writes a narrative about events involving Jesus of Nazareth from the point of view of his mother Mary. When her testament is given, she is in old age and feels that death is not far away. She will be glad when it comes. Some of the events she recalls are recent, but most of them hark back to the final weeks of her son’s life, a son whom she still misses and whose suffering can never be erased from her mind.Mary now lives in Ephesus. Her…
‘Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh…’ This short novella is an amazingly powerful account of a mother’s love and grief for her son. The fact that that son happens to be, perhaps, the Son of God is secondary. Beautifully written and with some wonderful, often poetic, imagery, Tóibín shows us Mary as a woman who lives each day with guilt and pain that she couldn’t stop the events that led her son to the cruel martyrdom of the cross.As Jesus’ followers encourage her to embellish her story to tie in with the…
Mary As Bitter Mourner A powerful imagining of how the death of Jesus might have been experienced by his mother — if in fact his mother was a Judean peasant woman in the first century of the Roman Empire, and not the Queen of Heaven. This Mary is old, she is bitter, and she is very human.The tale is told by Mary in her old age, living out her life in a house in Ephesus, where two disciples try to get her to remember Jesus life and death as they want to have it remembered. Mary, however, remembers it…