Mary Said What She Said: Isabelle Huppert’s Queen of Scots is a force of nature

Isabelle Huppert made her London stage debut in 1996 as Mary Stuart (also known as Mary, Queen of Scots) in a National theatre revival of Schiller’s mighty verse drama depicting Mary’s final days, Mary Stuart. Anna Massey was Elizabeth I (agonising over her cousin’s fate) but all eyes were on the beautiful French debutant. But, alas, the critics weren’t much enamoured.

One decried her “jerky, spasmodic vocal delivery and a puppeteerish set of gesticulations”, while the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer was held grimly rapt by the collision of “weird vowel sounds and choppy rhythms of speech like cars in a motorway pile-up”.

Perhaps Huppert, now 71, can afford herself a wry smile as she takes her bows at the Barbican (where she was last seen, in 2016, in an experimental Polish Phedre): she’s playing the French-raised Mary afresh, and in French, in a radically different account that invites us to consider jerky, spasmodic, weird and choppy as crowning glories.

This production by that doyen of the American avant-garde Robert Wilson – which has roamed since its originating premiere at the Théâtre de la Ville, Paris in 2019 – resembles an act of defiance in keeping with the embattled fortitude of its benighted subject.

With an ornate, prose-poem-esque text by African-American author Darryl Pinckney which draws on Mary’s tear-stained letters, it makes few concessions to those not up to speed with her life. Across 90 minutes, we’re subjected to a torrent of words, some recorded, most spoken live, imparted over a quasi classical, often remorseless score by Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi.

“Go as you would to a museum, as you would look at a painting,” Wilson has said when advising the spectator on how to approach his work. And there are times when all you can do – if your eyes are not too busy hastening after the galloping surtitles, your ears not too stuffed with the speed of Huppert’s virtuosic delivery – is gawp. Against a vast screen whose colours shift with a mesmeric intensity akin to the Northern Lights, the actress’s period-dressed essence of regal sangfroid is an object of constant fascination.

Mary’s four maidservants were also called Mary; she intones their names often, like a prayer, as if she’s imprisoned even in her companionships. As she approaches the judgement day of the guillotine, there’s much to get off her chest, with mad cackles, broken-record repetitions and parodic curtseys; the queen recalls her first, French husband who died young, her hatred of Scotland, and her passion for her third husband, Lord Bothwell.

Huppert is unflagging, a force of nature – at times simply a babbling mouth, like a tormented soul out of Beckett, but also sweeping across her domain with command. In one remarkable sequence she diagonally advances, then reverses across the stage, as if stuck in a Sisyphean loop of defeat and renewed determination. Here is history in all its peculiar horror, lifted free of text-books and turned into a spectacle of existential suffering.

Until May 12. Tickets: barbican.org.uk