Forgotten plays: No 10 – Mary Rose (1920) by JM Barrie
I have neglected Scotland so far in this series, though I was tempted to include one of the great working-class dramas such as Joe Corrie’s In Time O’ Strife (1927) or Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep (1947). I have plumped for this strange, sinister ghost story, partly as a reminder that there was more to Barrie than Peter Pan and partly because the play has much to say about the anguish of mother-son relationships and the universal grief for loss.
Barrie knows how to make one’s flesh creep. His play starts with a young soldier looking over a shuttered Sussex mansion and forbidden access to an empty room. As he falls asleep by the fire, the past history of the house and its inhabitants comes to life. We see how Mary Rose, daughter of the Morland family, twice disappeared during a visit to a remote Hebridean island: once briefly when she was a girl and then for 25 years when she was a married woman with a young son. Each time, she reappears mysteriously unchanged but, at the play’s climax, she is a ghostly revenant still pining for the son she has lost and searching for her place in the universe.
Related: Forgotten Plays: No 9 – The Words Upon the Window-Pane and Purgatory by WB Yeats
As always with Barrie, there are moments of whimsy: it’s a tough ask for the actor playing Mary Rose to confide in a rowan tree that she has a baby boy and “he says such beautiful things about loving me.” But there is always more to Barrie than meets the eye.
He subverts stereotypes so that a young Highland gillie turns out to be studying for the ministry, and far wiser and shrewder than the visitors he escorts to the island. In rejecting scientific materialism, Barrie also poses unnerving questions: if the dead did come back to life, would we really want them? Behind the action, you also sense a wounded heart. If Barrie repeatedly returns to the subject of mothers and sons, it is because he himself was a lost boy neglected by his own grieving mother after the death of his elder brother.
The play certainly works on stage. I saw it in 1972 in a production by Manchester’s 69 Theatre Company that came to London and starred Mia Farrow, who, as director Braham Murray said, “was born to play Mary Rose”. Hitchcock also passionately wanted to turn the play into a movie with Tippi Hedren in the title role, but was thwarted by Universal Studios. I still think the play is due for rediscovery. It must have had a chilling resonance in 1920 so soon after the first world war. I suspect today the concept of The Island That Likes to Be Visited – as Mary Rose’s Hebridean hideaway is called – would still act as a potent symbol for death.
