Oh, Mary! is mad – and maddening

Mary Todd Lincoln was, by all accounts, an unstable character. Prone to mood swings, foul temper, delusion and wild spending, she indulged, wrote one historian, in “orgies of buying things”. In Cole Escola’s queer reimagining of her life, one suspects she wouldn’t quit there. After all those labels ascribed throughout history – bipolar, amnesiac, menstrual, vitamin deficient – now Mary earns one that, at least of late, has come to be used affectionately: unhinged. Which is not to imply historical accuracy. The only credible thing about this mad production is Escola’s claim that it was written without any research. For theirs is a self-described “stupid play”; it grins, like a back-of-the-classroom schoolchild, in the face of scrutiny. What should we make of that protective instinct to avoid being taken seriously?

Indulge it? Well, Oh, Mary! is a stupid play – supposedly winging its way to two Tonys. It is also stupidly funny. A much-hyped hit on Broadway in 2024, it made a star of Escola, the non-binary actor who wrote the script and played Mary, and Sam Pinkleton, who directed it. The jokes are crass, the plot thin, the concept novel and exciting: Honest Abe is gay and scheming, while his wife is a thoroughly modern Mary – a raging drunk and former cabaret performer desperate to return to the stage and her “madcap medleys”. She drinks – whiskey, paint thinner, also a bucket of her own vomit (so stupid!) – to feel something. At one point, her sexual frustration rubs up against the corner of Lincoln’s walnut desk. Restless and exasperating, she is a nightmare to be around; always bored, but never boring. During their Broadway run, Escola had pinned to their dressing room mirror a note, which reveals as far as it is possible the well-disguised heart of this play: “Can you love me if I’m annoying?” Asking for a friend.

Thanks to Mason Alexander Park, playing her in the London transfer with battery-powered charm, Mary is endearing. She is also a caricaturish halfwit. The first lady has as much interest in her husband’s civil war as Melania had in Trump’s second election campaign: “the south of what?” Mary shrieks, four years into the conflict. We know the president will soon be assassinated in front of a theatre audience: Chekhov’s gun sits in the top drawer of his desk. But the prop, when revealed, is a toy made of wood. Do not expect solemn political commentary; this is theatre designed to defuse.

So far, so transgressive – yet the atmosphere of this production is quaint rather than edgy. It is an improbable, old-fashioned, bawdy door farce, more like Carry on Cavalry! than tragicomedy. Or, indeed, Carry on Camping, as Mary, with her husband’s encouragement, dips a heeled boot back into the world of the stage – first Shakespeare then, if she gets her way, cabaret.

Park, who played the Emcee in the West End’s Cabaret, is here both damsel and panto dame; the audience dutifully, gleefully participates. Claws out, hissing, Park’s Mary is a house cat by circumstance, feral by nature: she screams like a banshee, then flits around – all sweetness and light – as a model of exaggerated femininity, wearing her hair in Amy March ringlets and a wounded, juvenile expression. If predictable punchlines have impact, it is owing to Park’s committed, erratic physical comedy and timing; groan-worthy dialogue would be coarser were it not for the smooth, steady delivery of Giles Terera as Abraham and Dino Fetscher as Mary’s strapping acting tutor (“Oh fuck!” she notes as he enters in leggings; the audience heartily agrees). All is loud and unabashed and wilfully conspicuous – we can point and laugh, and that is pleasing. What lies underneath? Pinkleton exploits the comic potential of the crinoline: no opportunity for knicker-flashing is missed.

If the laughs are cheap, expense is also spared on the set (by design collective Dots), which embraces a naff, community-theatre aesthetic: here is Lincoln’s White House office, but with wallpapered flats and plasticky topiary. There is a chaise on which to swoon, two doors through which to burst unannounced, and a desk on which to… you get it. We are a long way from Hamilton’s “room where it happens”: there is no revolution, and whatever is built collapses as easily as it is made on close inspection.

But we have come to laugh, not to examine. At 80 minutes, the romp is quick. We leave, high-coloured, rather pleased. But I did wonder about Mary, about what more might have been made of her story had we been permitted, even in snatches, to take her seriously. All the silliness is maddeningly insistent, never yielding to subtext and sincerity. We love annoying people because they are human. Where does that leave Mary?

Oh, Mary! is at Trafalgar theatre, London, until 25 April

Photograph by Manuel Harlan