Perhaps this bustle represents a woman trying to distract herself from the horrors of her memories but all the antic movement gives the script a lulling sameness, at least until the terrible confessions of the finale. Warner keeps Shaw constantly busy: arranging props, moving furniture, changing in and out of clothes – at one point stripping off entirely. But it sometimes seems as though Warner, her longtime collaborator, doesn't entirely trust her or the material. The play is a workout for Shaw, a searing and versatile actor. Mary seems at once a Nazarene matron and a modern widow. Tóibín's language, while literary, is never unplayable, and though Mary is remarkably silent in the New Testament, he gives her a full and often sardonic voice, as when she describes the disciples as 'misfits, only children like himself, or men without fathers, or men who could not look a woman in the eye'. If others have gone on to hail her son as perfect, divine, the saviour of the world, that doesn't lessen her grief at having seen him tortured and killed, 'splayed against the sky'.

What Shaw and Tóibín do offer is one woman's anguished revelation of the sufferings she and her son endured. I suppose some could call the work blasphemous but that would indicate a failure to acknowledge the discrepancies among the Gospels themselves. Once everyone takes their seats, Shaw re-emerges wearing rather more ordinary clothes – a black tunic over rolled dungarees – and begins her monologue.

The testament of mary sparknotes