Mary Said What She Said review – Isabelle Huppert shimmers as Mary, Queen of Scots

Adelaide festival

This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but Huppert delivers an exacting performance in Robert Wilson’s hypnotic, incantatory play

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ary, Queen of Scots is one of those perennial figures trotted out as a universal signifier, often for femininity itself, an image of rectitude and self-sacrifice in the face of unimaginable deprivation. The problem is that the historical record doesn’t quite support this narrative: Mary possibly conspired to murder her second husband in order to marry her third, and despite protestations to the contrary, remained a serious threat to the reign of Elizabeth I until the moment she was executed. She was a political player who lost, not an ingenue caught in the crossfire of history.