Mary Page Marlowe at a glance

Show
Mary Page Marlowe (UK premiere)
Status
Closed 1 November 2025
Venue
The Old Vic, 103 The Cut, London SE1 8NB
Run dates
23 September – 1 November 2025 (strictly limited)
Opening night
8 October 2025
Genre
Play (drama)
Running time
1 hour 30 minutes, no interval
Age guidance
14+
Writer
Tracy Letts (Pulitzer winner for August: Osage County)
Director
Matthew Warchus (The Old Vic; Matilda the Musical)
Headline cast
Susan Sarandon (UK stage debut), Andrea Riseborough, Rosy McEwen, Eleanor Worthington-Cox, Alisha Weir
Configuration
The auditorium was transformed in-the-round for this production
Premiere history
Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago (2016) → Off-Broadway (2018) → The Old Vic UK premiere (2025)

Looking back: Mary Page Marlowe at The Old Vic

4.4
★★★★☆

LTH Retrospective Rating

Retrospective by the London Theatre Hub editorial team. Last updated: 13 May 2026.

The Verdict

Of all the new plays Tracy Letts has brought to the stage, Mary Page Marlowe is the quietest and, in some ways, the most ambitious. There is no grand set-piece dinner, no broiling family argument à la August: Osage County. There is a woman, played by five different actors at different ages, and 11 scenes that the audience must arrange into a coherent life. The Old Vic premiere, which kicked off Matthew Warchus's final season as artistic director, leaned into the play's structural challenge with an in-the-round staging that put the audience inside the assembly process.

Susan Sarandon's UK stage debut was the headline. Andrea Riseborough's return to theatre after fifteen years away was, for many people in the building, the bigger event. Both were good — Sarandon dry and exact in the late-life scenes, Riseborough restless and unmistakably present in the middle-age fragments. The supporting ensemble, Rosy McEwen and Eleanor Worthington-Cox in particular, did the unglamorous heavy lifting of building Mary as a person rather than as a vehicle for star-casting. The result was a play that earned its emotional payoff slowly — the audiences who came expecting a Sarandon star turn were the ones least prepared for what the play actually does.

What Made It Special

  • The fragmented structure. Eleven non-chronological scenes, five actors playing the same woman. Letts trusts the audience to do the assembly themselves, and the play is more powerful for the trust.
  • Susan Sarandon's UK stage debut. Sarandon had never appeared on a British stage. Her presence — and Andrea Riseborough's return after fifteen years away — gave the production its commercial spine while never overwhelming the play's smaller ambitions.
  • Matthew Warchus's in-the-round staging. The Old Vic auditorium was reconfigured for the run, with Rob Howell's set placing the audience around Mary's life rather than facing it. The architectural commitment matched the play's structural one.
  • The supporting ensemble. Rosy McEwen, Eleanor Worthington-Cox, Alisha Weir as the younger Marys; Hugh Quarshie, Paul Thornley, Lauren Ward, Melanie La Barrie in supporting roles. A working company rather than a star vehicle.
  • Pulitzer-winner Tracy Letts at his most restrained. No fireworks, no act-three explosion. Mary Page Marlowe is Letts in minor-key mode, and the work rewards close attention.

Everything You Need to Know

What happens in Mary Page Marlowe?

Mary Page Marlowe is an accountant from Dayton, Ohio. The play opens with Mary at 40, sitting in a restaurant with her two children, telling them she is divorcing their father and moving to Kentucky. From there, the play jumps — backwards, forwards, sideways — across 11 scenes that span 70 years of her life.

The non-chronological scenes

One scene shows Mary at 12, in conflict with her own mother. Another shows her in her late twenties, navigating a first marriage. Another shows her at 50, dealing with the legal consequences of three drink-driving convictions. Another shows her in her late sixties, with a quietness that the earlier scenes have not prepared the audience for. The order is deliberately broken; the audience puts the timeline together themselves.

Five Marys, one woman

Five actors play Mary at different ages: Alisha Weir as Mary at 12, Eleanor Worthington-Cox at 19, Rosy McEwen at 27 and 36, Andrea Riseborough at 40, 44 and 50, and Susan Sarandon at 59, 63 and 69. The casting is not gimmick. Letts wrote the play partly to test what happens when an audience sees the same character played by visibly different people across a single evening — whether the self that travels through a life is one self or several. The play's quiet conclusion turns on that question.

The ordinary as subject

Mary is not a famous person. Nothing momentous happens to her. She works as an accountant, she has children, she divorces, she remarries, she ages, she dies. The play's claim is that this constitutes a life as worth attention as any other — and that the ways we narrate ourselves to ourselves, fragmentary and out of order, are the closest most of us get to making sense of who we are.