★★★★★

“profoundly touching, yet disarmingly humorous”

As the lights dimmed at The Old Vic, we entered not just a theatre, but a sanctuary for the soul. The audience sat in quiet anticipation, as if awaiting words from an old friend. Michael Rosen walked into a pool of warm light, holding a stack of papers like a weathered diary. With clean, crystalline clarity, he began—and we were immediately, effortlessly ushered into his world.

Getting Through It is a bill of monologues and poetry — fragments of memory, love, and survival stitched together through Rosen’s voice. This world is built not on spectacle, but on profound simplicity — a warm stage, a glass of water, a chair. This minimalism gave every word space to breathe. When he said, “Death is not the problem. Grief is,” the silence in the room felt deeply understanding.

Yet this was not a heavy-hearted lament. Though Rosen spoke of losing his son Eddie, he filled the journey with light, everyday details. Small memories of Eddie’s childhood — ordinary moments — began to glow in his telling.

These details become the very architecture of memory, constantly reverberating through time. The “orange head” joke found its touching resolution in Eddie’s Joke Book. Every person who crossed paths with Eddie gently pulled us back in time, leaving us quietly reflecting on “how time flies.” Laughter flowed easily throughout, and tears fell freely — grief rooted deeply in the soil of his story, yet offered not as a burden, but as a landscape to walk through.

The second half of the show detailed his near-fatal battle with COVID-19 — a stunning act of emotional alchemy. It was profoundly touching, yet disarmingly humorous. We must hold in reverence those who can transform pain into humour, and revere even more those who remember every soul that has passed through their life. His depiction of the care provided by medical staff was rendered with microscopic tenderness. He immerses us completely in the terrifying reality of a body that no longer belongs to itself, where the captured kindness of caregivers becomes the most touching — the most human — softness imaginable.

Getting Through It — by Michael Rosen — is, ultimately, a definitive argument for the power of theatre. The strongest stories need no elaborate sets — just a master storyteller and a space for collective reflection. Rosen has a rare gift: he gathers scattered fragments of life and weaves them together until, in a single moment of time and space, they meet, cycle, return, and resonate.

This is more than a storytelling masterpiece — it is a masterclass in how to tell a life. In his words, and in the shared quiet of the theatre, lives and moments find their eternal echo.

MARY PAGE MARLOWE

Old Vic

★★★★

“The supporting cast are uniformly excellent, providing light and shade where needed”

If you break a hologram, the original image remains visible in each fragment, but the viewing angle for each piece is narrower, like looking through a smaller window. Every fragment shows the whole picture, but from a different perspective.

Tracy Letts’ intriguing play, “Mary Page Marlowe”, is constructed along similar lines. Carefully selected moments, some mundane and some pivotal, are patch-worked together in no particular order to paint a full, yet intimate, portrait of a woman. An “unexceptional” woman, according to the titular character herself. The experience for the audience, though, is quite the opposite. It is an exceptional and extraordinary play in which time is random. Five actors perform the role of Mary Page Marlowe, charting seventy years of her life over the course of eleven short scenes. A cradle to grave story (the baby Mary is represented by a doll – a less risky proposition than having a real baby onstage as in the premiere nine years ago in Chicago) that spirals around the life of Mary Page – along with her three husbands, two children, alcoholic mother, palliative nurse, therapist, lover… and so on.

We first see her explaining how her divorce will affect and uproot her children, before we flip back to her bright and buoyant schooldays, before fast forwarding to her twilight years. She is then a baby, mewling and puking; and then the lover, sighing like a furnace. There are indeed reflections on Shakespeare’s seven stages of life, albeit as though the bard had thrown his folio into the air and let the pages fall haphazardly around him.

Each scene is succinct and stand alone in its own right; with outstanding, natural performances from the entire cast. The common thread is often missing, however, and we feel that we are not watching the same woman in different stages of her life, but many people’s stories. The distancing of emotional connection that this results in is compensated for, however, by the ingenious structure and Matthew Warchus’ sublime direction. Staged in the round, it emphasises the concept that past, present and future are as one. When the telephone rings at the end of one scene, the weight of its significance is truly felt because we have already seen what comes after.

Each Mary is highly watchable. Alisha Weir’s twelve-year-old Mary is a convincing mix of obstinance and innocence whose rose-tinted view of life is already eroded by her late teens: Eleanor Worthington-Cox captures the ambiguity of hope versus disillusionment in denial. The more Mary ages, the stronger the characterisation. Rosy McEwen, as Mary the adulteress, is a personality to be reckoned with, while Andrea Riseborough lights up the stage every time she appears with her brutally honest energy and physicality, steering Mary on a crash course off the rails. Many people may be drawn to this show by the casting of Susan Sarandon, but the play is, by no means, a vehicle for starry casting. Sarandon has as little stage time as the others, and she uses it as efficiently. Poised and in complete control, Sarandon evokes regret and sadness with a stoicism that matches her presence.

The supporting cast are uniformly excellent, providing light and shade where needed. Kingsley Morton’s schoolfriend, Connie, is a very funny breath of fresh air. Melanie La Barrie’s nurse is wryly comic but wise. A wisdom that is perhaps missing from Mary’s mother, grippingly portrayed by Eden Epstein. The moods are heightened by Hugh Vanstone’s sensitive lighting, but occasionally dampened by some overlong scene changes.

Despite all, however, Letts’ storytelling is a bit of a puzzle and, at times, hard work. The scrambled record of events can be distracting and the true hold on our attention is sometimes out of reach. We are never really let into the life of Mary Page Marlowe. The play hides as much as it reveals, which is part of its charm, but it is also frustratingly inconsequential. Letts wants us to question how much we can really know a person – even ourselves. We are teased into wanting to find out the answer, but left hanging. However, the meaninglessness (for want of a better word) is, in turn, inconsequential. We are won over by the truly mesmerising ensemble cast.

GETTING THROUGH IT

Old Vic

★★★★★

“profoundly touching, yet disarmingly humorous”

GETTING THROUGH IT

Old Vic the UK Tour continues

Reviewed on 19th October 2025

by Portia Yuran Li

Previously reviewed at this venue:

GETTING THROUGH IT

GETTING THROUGH IT

GETTING THROUGH IT

MARY PAGE MARLOWE

Old Vic

★★★★

“The supporting cast are uniformly excellent, providing light and shade where needed”