Mary Said What She Said (Pamphlet)

A complex meditation on divine right, betrayal and mortality. The taut, layered script is by Wilson’s trusted collaborator Darryl Pinckney . . . Wilson and Pinckney sift and intensify [Mary’s] experience, reinforcing it through strangeness and repetition.

Here is history in all its peculiar horror, lifted free of textbooks.

Discomfiting, dazzling . . . A tough, unique piece of work.

Structured and formal yet also capable of producing strong, fierce emotion and even flashes of humour. It is an undoubted tour de force.

Magnificently sui generis . . . Darryl Pinckney’s lyrical language is inflected with Tudor verse, flashes of Shakespeare, and cloaked in Beckettian existential angst.

Darryl Pinckney’s script swings in close – to show us the Marys sewing or playing with jewels – and spins out for a wider view, snubbing an entire country as “land of fog and urinating sheep”. In his 2022 mind-whirl memoir, Come Back in September, Pinckney showed how literature can wake you up: now he is part of a play which proves that theatre can do the same.