Oh, Mary! Reviews: What the Critics Say
Oh, Mary! opened at the Trafalgar Theatre in December 2025, already bringing with it two Tony Awards and a place on the Pulitzer shortlist from New York. The London press could not agree on it.
The notices run from two stars to five. They were written at press night, with Mason Alexander Park as Mary and Giles Terera as her husband. Both have since left the production.
Find tickets
The Critics' Verdict
The Guardian and the Times both gave it two stars.
The Telegraph, the Independent, the Evening Standard, The Stage and WhatsOnStage all gave four. Time Out gave three. The five-star notices came from the theatre press rather than the national papers.
Nobody is arguing about what happens on stage. The two-star reviews and the four-star reviews describe the same eighty minutes: a broad, camp, deliberately silly comedy running on two jokes, played completely straight by five actors, with a Mary who is drunk from the start. The programme itself calls the cheap retro look deliberate. Holly O'Mahony in The Stage, at four stars, called it "not a herstory levelling up of the history books, just a weird and at moments wonderful 'what if?' farce". The Guardian makes the same observation and counts it as the fault.
What the Reviews Praised
The lead performance, at every star rating. Not one critic disputed Park's technical command. The Evening Standard's Nick Curtis called the performance "the polar opposite of subtle but exactingly precise and finely detailed". Time Out's Andrzej Lukowski, giving it three stars, still called Park "a marvel" and "a human special effect". The Telegraph's Dominic Cavendish said it was "no reductive drag act".
One particular scene, singled out by critics on both sides of the split: Mary trying and failing to work out how to get down off a desk. Curtis called it "a masterpiece of physical comedy"; Lukowski, unconvinced by nearly everything else, called it "one glorious non sequitur of a scene".
Giles Terera as Mary's Husband, warmly, everywhere. The Independent's Alice Saville described him as "her subtler, sleeker adversary, wittily capturing the hypocrisy of a powerful man who wanted to marry an interesting woman, then make her life as dull as possible".
What the show is, rather than what it lacks. Saville placed it in a genre of its own, "mixing the farcical humour of am-dram classics like Charley's Aunt with the disturbing queer energy of early John Waters films". Cavendish argued the artifice is the point, and that under the camp there is "a truth about the necessity of self-expression", about people not allowed to be themselves.
Where Reviews Were Mixed
The material, and the objection is consistent. The Guardian's Arifa Akbar argued that a play billed as giving Mary Todd Lincoln her due gives her nothing at all. You learn next to nothing about the woman, the actual drama belongs to the men around her, and Mary is written to be laughed at by everybody on stage. Akbar wrote of feeling "cheated of story, character, wit or wonder". The Stage read the same character the other way: "Escola isn't laughing at her: she's a fabulous creation, the kind of loose cannon by whom you'd happily be led astray."
The Times arrived at the same verdict for a different reason. Clive Davis found "the script and jokes remain ridiculously thin" and called it "really a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched to improbable lengths". He says in the same review that he loved Titanique and calls it one of his favourite West End shows of the year, so camp is fine, but he just didn't get on with the show.
Whether the comedy travels. Lukowski heard something older and more British in it than its New York reputation suggests, "a little bit Airplane!, a little bit Benny Hill, maybe even a touch of Mr Bean", and explained the divide this way: London has been handed the full Broadway show without the cabaret-fringe journey that made it, and English audiences have no strong feelings about the Lincolns to subvert.
The positive reviews concede the negative case. Cavendish calls the show "a quirky footnote". Curtis says it will not have the cultural impact here that it had in America. WhatsOnStage's Sarah Crompton describes it as "a piece almost entirely without sub-text" and counts that a virtue. Saville says the energy peters out towards the end. Nobody is claiming a hidden depth. The four-star critics think a very funny eighty minutes is enough on its own; the two-star critics think it is not.
The audience is not split in the same way. Both of the two-star critics record the room around them enjoying it, and Lukowski separates his own response from the laughter he could hear.
Is Oh, Mary! Right for You?
Book it if you want to laugh for eighty minutes and do not need the play to be about anything.
Book it if you like camp, broad and silly played completely straight. Crompton's headline was that there is nothing else like it in the West End, and even the critics who disliked it did not dispute that.
Think twice if you want the history, or the revisionist portrait the billing suggests. That is the Guardian's objection.
Think twice if crude sexual comedy is not your night out. This is a play with body-fluid gags, sustained drunkenness and constant innuendo!
Call us on 020 7193 9050 and we will talk it through.
Book Oh, Mary! Tickets
Most seats are around £40 to £80, with premium seats from around £100 and the cheapest at around £30. All-in pricing, so the price you see is what you pay.
The schedule, the seats and who is playing Mary are all on our Oh, Mary! tickets page.
Find tickets • Call us on 020 7193 9050
Sources
The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent, Evening Standard, The Stage, WhatsOnStage, Time Out, Musical Theatre Review, The Reviews Hub, London Theatre 1, Flicker Magazine, Theatre Weekly, LouReviews, Theatre and Tonic, West End Wilma, theatreCat, The Arts Dispatch, BroadwayWorld.