This heartfelt revival of JM Barrie's forgotten ghost play of 1920, in which the eponymous heroine vanishes from a Scottish island and reappears 20 years later, quite unaware that time has passed, left me moved and exhilarated.
Just as Peter Pan was inspired by the universal dream of remaining forever young, so Mary Rose appealed to anyone nursing post-war hopes that their long-lost, beloved would be discovered alive and well.
Unfortunately, Hamish Gray's revival accentuates Barrie's characteristic winsomeness. His bawling actors emphasise rather than underplay Barrie's mawkish infantilising of adult erotic relations. But Gray still magically realises the over-whelming pathos of the bitter-sweet finale and fans the play's strange, chill airs of spookiness.
Gray's own stage design ingeniously dispenses with Barrie's conventional scenic arrangements and removes Mary Rose from realism's confines. He achieves this change by conflating the play's two locations. The dust-sheeted, drawing room of a derelict manor house, where the play begins, is decorated with a tracery of stones, logs and twigs that represent the island to which the action moves. Tom Sykes, convincingly fraught as a young Australian soldier who arrives to view the haunted house, experiences a ghostly frisson. The years fall away to reveal Andy Snowball's absurdly juvenile midshipman Simon asking for young Mary's Rose's hand in marriage. But Rosa Blacker's ridiculously simpering, giggling Mary Rose is already a girl with a past, that past involving a disappearance on the Scottish island
I would diminish the play's creepy, cumulative tension if I were to reveal just how Mary Rose eerily foreshadows the theme of Pinter's A Kind of Alaska. But the finale requires elucidation: the female ghost, true to Barrie's weird psychopathology, is a mother who wants to play the little girl to her adult son.The soldier sees his dead relations come back to life and happily entwine themselves in each other's arms, freezing in an eternal tableau.
You may only keep the dead alive, Barrie indelibly suggests, by forever recreating in your mind the happiness they brought you.
Mary Rose
