Review: Mary Said What She Said - Adelaide Festival
"She is fractured, like a broken mirror, and the script attempts to reassemble these shards without obscuring their cracks."
Reviewed Saturday 7 March, 8pm, 2026.
Directed by Robert Wilson and performed by Isabelle Huppert. Score by Ludovico Einaudi and costumes by Jacques Reynaud.
Mary Said What She Said is a three-act monologue based on the letters of Mary Queen of Scots and adapted by the late avant-garde theatre maker Robert Wilson from Darryl Pinckney’s text of the same name. Set on the eve of her execution at Fotheringhay Castle, Mary Said What She Said is a poetic testimony of Mary’s life, her relationships, her passions and torments, and her vision for the future of her infant son who will become King.
Created with and performed by French étoile actress Isabelle Huppert since it’s 2019 premiere at Theatre de la Ville (Paris), the restaging of Mary Said What She Said in Australia exclusively for the Adelaide Festival is undoubtedly a major festival coup. Despite the work’s suitability for a festival format (a one-woman show is easier to bump in than a large cast work), there were elements of the staging that did not travel so well, weakening the formal unity of the production. Nonetheless, the jarring incoherence conjured by Wilson’s violent minimalism and Pinckney’s fractured text successfully brought to life the shape of an equally cryptic character - Mary Queen of Scots.
The performance opened to reveal Huppert, back to the audience, standing with tense courtly posture. In the shadows, Huppert’s form appears unnaturally angular, accentuated by the silhouette of her Renaissance costume. Slowly turning, Huppert begins to speak Pinckney’s script with incantational quality. We can barely make out her face in the darkness, lending the sounds a distance from her body. Her delivery, too, is powerfully disembodied. Huppert speaks as though possessed, pushing out phrases from the bottom of her throat whilst barely breathing, anticipating her own decapitation. Bar exaggerated jaw articulation, her body is rigid, frozen from the neck down. There is tension between the poetic pulse of Pinchkin’s script, spoken in French but translated in English, and the stately stoicism of it’s recital.
The English translation of Huppert’s script presents the first experiential difficulty. For the majority of the work, Huppert is situated in the centre of the stage. The translations flashing on signs affixed to the proscenium are distant enough from the actress as to prevent simultaneously watching and reading. The viewer must either struggle to dart quickly between actress and screen, or relinquish and choose just one. Either way, information is always missing and total comprehension is impossible, to say nothing of the absurdly fast delivery of Huppert’s lines and non-linearity of Pinchkin’s text.
Mary Said What She Said functions like a life flashing before one’s eyes. The play’s three acts divide the chapters of her life: her birth in Scotland and short-lived marriage to Francis II; her marriage to Henry Stuart and affair with the Earl of Bothwell, who is involved in the assassination of the former; and her abdication and flee to England where she is imprisoned by Elizabeth I until her death. Despite these chronological divisions, each section interweaves phrases and subject matter from across Mary’s memories, opposing narrative linearity and creating flashes of connection that cut across space and time.
The clue to this formal strategy lies in the phrase that Mary adopted as a motto during her imprisonment - “In my end is my beginning”. This sense of continuity, of endless looping and cyclicality is central to the performance script, and Huppert’s submission to its fluctuacting rhythms becomes a sharp dynamic exercise. Not only does the actress jump quickly through space and time, but she also dynamically shifts registers, emotional states, and perspectives. In one moment she is personal, pained and microscopic, the next she is collective, formidable, a Queen of her people. She is fractured, like a broken mirror, and the script attempts to reassemble these shards without obscuring their cracks. Ruptures are integrated within the form, painting a true portrait of Mary’s complex character and perhaps nodding to her infamous coded letters.
Although the text and its formal symbolism is powerful, the disjointed experience of the performance and its hard-to-follow surtitles did create friction. This friction could at least find justification in its parallel textual fragmentation. Less convincing was the use of vocal recordings alongside Huppert’s performance. Whilst the use of Huppert’s own voice as a kind of call-and-response echo worked to heighten repetition and a sense of looping, the introduction of other voices, a man and a young girl, both speaking English, felt unnecessary and excessive. Perhaps these voices offered some contextual depth, but from an aesthetic perspective, they shattered the already fragile world of the play.
Paired with the dystopian effect of the voice recordings, Wilson’s minimalist stage design lacked some humanity. Moments of softness in Huppert’s movements or in the plumes of smoke falling from the sky in act two offered welcome lyricism against the harsh landscape of white slits of light. Likewise, the richness of Pinchkin’s text emphasised the emptiness of the production, and I found myself thinking how a work built on minimal sets and voice recordings is easy to tour. Audiences shouldn’t be reminded of a work’s travel viability whilst watching it. The experience should feel internally complete. Although successful in it’s intentional disorienting, some formal decisions in this vein felt too heavy-handed.
Nonetheless, Mary Said What She Said is a highly sophisticated work of avant-garde theatre. It was invigorating to witness an artist of Huppert’s calibre embody the character of Mary Queen in Scots in Bob Wilson’s distinctive abstract style. In experiencing Huppert’s physical presence bleed into the work’s text and her voice intertwine with the score, one was reminded of the importance of experimental theatre to the reimagining of historical stories. As Huppert herself says in a 2016 interview at Toronto International Film Festival, “Theatre is always to go against convention. There is no theatre worthwhile unless you go against convention.”
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Mary Said What She Said continues at the Festival Theatre as part of Adelaide Festival until Sunday 8 March. Tickets available here.
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Reviewed by Belle Beasley for Post-Performance, with contributions from Jessica Rose Pearson.
Love this! Had no idea you were there too… it was incredible ✨