Regal Romp

By T.E. Kalem

MARY STUART by Wolfgang Hildesheimer

This play begins in a death chamber. Gray, broody castle walls define the prison cell. In the dim light, we make out the anguished figure of a woman in a sackcloth shift. It is Mary Stuart, pretender to the English throne, and the velvet-covered block on which she sits will soon receive her severed head.

This might seem like the darkling prologue to a swellingly somber theme. Will 'German Playwright Hildesheimer offer us fresh insights into Mary's vaulting ambitions, her untempered will, her vulnerable femininity and her invincible Catholicism? Or will he move us by limming the last pathetic hours of a woman at the mercy of a woman who knows no mercy, Elizabeth I? Neither. Hildesheimer believes that history is an obscene irony, an absurdist fable signifying nothing. His prelates, earls, doctors, ladies in waiting and greedy hangers-on vary so little from the monarch that they are all like cards in a stacked deck.

The play begins sparely as the executioner, drolly played by Roy Cooper, mundanely outlines his craft and dis plays an austere professionalism. Mary (Roberta Maxwell) is listening for heavenly voices that will validate her martyrdom and self-proclaimed sainthood.

As Mary's retinue assembles, the pace quickens, and the play resembles a Marx brothers script co-authored by Genet and Brecht. As ladies in waiting attend the Queen, they are addressed from the rear by fornicating lackey-lovers. When Mary calls for her dogs, a bevy of stuffed canines are propped up before her. She chooses to disremember that she once had a hound killed for losing the scent in a foxhunt. Like unskilled pickpockets, her attendants try to plunder her last remaining jewelry. A marvelously comic doctor-apothecary team (John Bottom and Ron Faber) get the Queen deliriously squiffed on drugs before she attains her final serenely regal composure.

Roberta Maxwell's Mary is an acutely devastating portrait of a prima donna. She is vain, she is cruel, she throws temper tantrums, she is self-pitying, she is totally selfabsorbed. Unthroned, she is crowned in the dazzling radiance of her pride. Maxwell is in the top rank of U.S. actresses, and she proves it again in this kaleidoscopic performance.

The fractiously seriocomic play occupying the stage of Joseph Papp's Public Theater in Manhattan is not the real thing, but Roberta Maxwell very much is.

--By T.E.Kalem

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