EIF 2026 - Tansy Davies's Passion of Mary Magdalene at the Queen's Hall, or, An Undramatic, Unmoving Passion

 I didn't arrive at this show with high hopes. Back in April I listened to the Radio 3 broadcast of the world premiere performance of this work in London and, had I heard the broadcast before I booked my EIF tickets, I doubt I would have booked for this show. However, I bore in mind the fact that hearing a work live can be a very different experience to hearing a recording, and I hope I tried to approach the performance with an open mind. Sadly it did not change my views.

The work is unquestionably performed to a very high standard by an ensemble consisting of the Dunedin Consort, with two soloists - Marcus Farnsworth (Christus) and Anna Dennis (Mary Magdalene) - the whole directed by John Butt. The many exposed instrumental lines are all very well taken (though the instrumental writing did not, to my ear, have enough in it to sustain the length of work), and the chorus are strong both as a collective whole and in the many smaller solo parts. Similarly, both Farnsworth and Dennis do their best to make the work live. Dennis in particular has two extended sequences of highly virtuosic solo and performs them outstandingly.

But I'm afraid from where I was sitting these efforts were in vain because of the fundamentally flawed nature of Tansy Davies's work. As with other contemporary musical theatre pieces I've sat through in recent years Davies uses too much text and really struggles to set it with point. It's not clear from the limited information in the freesheet what the source of that text is. It is less over wordy or tiresomely political than say a David Harsent or Martin Crimp libretto but it is still guilty in places of overdoing things - I feared the sequence that works its way through a long list of constellations was never going to end. Often Davies sets a sentence with such painful slowness that any dramatic impact of the line is simply lost. As with new works without number she has problems with an ending - there's a very obvious place to stop at the first mention of silence, but the work continues a little longer with an ineffective coda.

Davies is also anxious to claim the work is telling things from a female point of view - to give us the voices "not only left out, but taken out" of the Passion story. I feel Mary Magdalene is quite a strong presence in that story already. But more to the point, this Passion doesn't entirely follow through on this - there's a long opening movement dominated by Farnsworth's Christus before Dennis sings a note, and although she then has the two long scenas already mentioned I can't say that she seemed to me to dominate the story, or that it was an overall narrative clearly being delivered either by Mary Magdalene or by women more broadly. 

This was a show that very much felt its 80 minutes. It seemed to get a warm reception in the hall, though I had a sense during the course of it that there might have been others within my eyesight who were not entirely convinced (and I felt for the two small children in the gallery who had been inexplicably brought along by their responsible adults and looked very bored - though the silent drama generated by their group was I fear a welcome distraction at times from the work on stage). If this gets further outings I'm afraid I can't recommend it.