Sharon Carty Anchors Irish National Opera's "Testament" Review

Mezzo-soprano Sharon Carty delivered a dominating performance as Mary in "Testament," Irish National Opera's new 80-minute opera that opened the Dublin Theatre Festival's 2026 season with music by Tarik O'Regan and a text rooted in Colm Tóibín's novella "The Testament of Mary."

The project has a layered history. Tóibín's play "Testament," a monologue for a single actress playing Mary, premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2011. Its success prompted him to rewrite it as the novella "The Testament of Mary," which keeps the premise but adds characters. That book — not the play — served as the opera's basis.

What does the opera actually give Mary?

The Bible never gives Mary a voice; her thoughts and emotions go unrecorded. Tóibín's answer imagines her years after the crucifixion as an elderly, traumatized woman reconstructing her son's life. The narrative isn't chronological. It opens with the raising of Lazarus and climaxes with Jesus' death and resurrection, and the line between memory and event dissolves as Mary relives what she describes.

This is no saintly Madonna. Mary flees the crucifixion because the pain is too much to bear, resists her son's followers when they press her to confirm the resurrection, and concludes that all the suffering "was not worth it." Her recollections also blur sequence — she recalls Cana after Lazarus, though the Bible reverses the order — which raises the opera's central question: who owns the past? Tóibín sets Mary against her son's followers and, by extension, the present-day Church, which had organized protests outside the theater before the performance.

How did the cast fare?

Carty anchored the evening. She mixed deep grief with anger and traces of paranoia, rarely resorting to histrionics, and physically re-enacted the crucifixion — unable to separate her pain from her son's. Director Rachel Hewer often pushed her to the edges of the stage, alone with her grief.

Six supporting characters surrounded her:

• Lazarus (Maksym Lozovyi), a non-speaking role — dirty, disheveled, wandering vacantly, showing no joy at his return from the grave.
• Martha (Deirdre Higgins), well-sung with a piercing upper register conveying emotional torment.
• Martha's unnamed sister (Sarah Luttrell), attractive and understated, with warm vocal coloring.
• Jesus' followers John, Paul and Markus — David Kennedy (baritone), Oisín Ó Dálaigh and Ben Escorio (tenors) — aggressively committed to promoting Jesus as the Son of God, producing engaging harmonies, particularly when intimidating Mary.

Kennedy stood out with a warm, burnished timbre, and he joined Higgins and Luttrell for a trio whose voices combined in pleasing colorful contrasts.

What did the staging and score contribute?

Hewer, with scenographer Francis O'Connor and costume designer Joan O'Clery, built a simple staging that blended period and modern — pastoral shades for everyone except Mary, who wore dark colors. A large inclined mirror above the stage offered multiple perspectives, spectacularly so in the crucifixion scene, where it was Mary — not Jesus — strapped to the cross, capturing her identification with her son's suffering. Jesus then appeared as a child, evoking Mary's happier memories. Toward the end, the black cross was lit with the words "Son of God" along its beams; Mary kept resisting that reading. She began the opera gagged, a pointed image of silencing.

At O'Regan's insistence, the seven musicians sat onstage, costumed and integrated into the drama. O'Regan's score moved between tonal and dissonant passages, unsettling and jagged in the crucifixion, but accessible in the dance music. Elaine Kelly, alone in the pit, drew an energetic, dramatically forceful reading from the ensemble of violin, viola, cello, flute/piccolo, clarinet, mandolin and accordion. The score's weakness, the review notes, is a generic quality — little that lingers in the memory.

"Testament" works as a showcase for a singing actress, and its challenge extends past the theater: Tóibín offers a possibility, not a truth, asking audiences to rethink what is all too easy to take as gospel.