Later Toibin expanded the text into a book published in 2012 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
In fact, Toibin conceived and wrote Mary’s testament as a dramatic monologue, which was performed by the great Irish actress Marie Mullen at the Dublin Theater Festival in 2011. The novel is short, to begin with (just 81 pages), and written in the first person, obviating the sometimes cumbersome chunks of description that can challenge one’s powers of concentration. “The Testament of Mary” is sort of an ideal audiobook. the woman who gave birth to the man who radically changed the course of Western history. Streep has recorded the audio edition of “The Testament of Mary,” Colm Toibin’s haunting, austere and deeply affecting book written in the voice of a figure who has gone largely voiceless (if hardly imageless) throughout the history of Christianity: the Virgin Mary, a.k.a. Now she’s landed a ripe plum of a different kind, and one that, in my view, provides her with yet another great role. (And blithely stooped to conquer quite a few of the not-so-juicy ones, too, as in “Mamma Mia!”) She’s virtually been sanctified as the Greatest Film Actress of her generation, which is why she’s managed to gobble up practically all the juicy roles for women over 45 in Hollywood in the past decade or so.
What’s more, Streep is practically a religious icon herself - or an aesthetic one, anyway. Doesn’t it seem inevitable that Meryl Streep would one day play the mother of Christ? Lord knows she’s played just about everybody and everything else: a Holocaust survivor, a chilly Australian housewife who lost a baby to a dingo, Margaret Thatcher and Isak Dinesen and Karen Silkwood, a Prada-wearing devil, a nun with a mean ax to grind, and, coming soon to a theater near you, the devouring Oklahoma mama of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “August: Osage County.”
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