Mary Tillett and John Rayment: and I looked at the sky - Interview

“Age has everything to do with it. Age is everything. Age is all we have.”

On Betty’s 86th birthday, a single candle on a carrot cake just isn’t good enough. While John has been outside digging up the last of the carrots and making her cake, Betty has been in her room recalling a decades-old promise.

Now, faced with that solitary candle, she wonders who she has been and why her hands feel so heavy. John has spent more than a week trying to write her birthday card, unable to find the words for whatever life they may have left.

John Rayment and Mary Tillett in rehearsals. Photo by Grey Swan/Tim Stubbs Hughes

Betty is an artist; John, a writer. Decades ago, they made a pact that if their creative spark faded, they would choose their own ending. Now they must decide whether that moment has arrived.
and I looked at the sky is a simmering, delicate play about ageing, love, and creativity.

We sat down with cast members Mary Tillett (Betty) and John Rayment (John) to learn more about the play.

What first drew you to these characters?

Mary (Betty): What pulled me in was how alive Betty still is. She’s eighty-six and not winding down. She’s still hungry, funny, sharp, exasperated by the man she’s loved for a lifetime, and still deeply connected to the artist she has always been. What frightened and interested me was the possibility that her work may no longer come, while everything else in her is still completely alive. That contradiction was irresistible.

John (John): For me it was the quietness of John. He’s a writer, so much of him happens below the surface, but I don’t think he’s passive at all. There’s an enormous amount of activity underneath that quiet. He’s spent decades putting things into words, and now he’s reached a point where some of the most important things can’t be solved by language. That felt very rich to explore.

Both characters are confronting the loss of the thing that has defined them creatively. How do you approach playing that?

Mary: You don’t play “loss”; you play someone still reaching for the thing. I try to hold onto what it feels like when the work is going well - that appetite, that excitement, that sense that something might suddenly reveal itself - and then let the reaching begin to cost her. The grief sits in the gap between desperately wanting to make something and beginning to wonder whether you still can.

John: I think of somebody whose craft has always been completely dependable and who suddenly finds it isn’t, almost like a craftsman whose hands have started to disagree with him. John approaches it practically, even stubbornly, rather than dramatically. For somebody who has spent his life believing words will eventually get him somewhere, discovering there are things words can’t solve is quite profound. The important thing is to keep his dignity in it and not announce the size of the loss.

How have you worked with Julia Stubbs to build the unspoken rhythm of such a long marriage?

Mary and John: We’ve built it through the small physical things first. Julia (the director) has been very precise about the domestic choreography: who fills the kettle, who already knows what the other person is going to do, who moves something without needing to ask, who finishes a task the other has begun. Some of it sounds ridiculously small, but that’s exactly the point. A marriage of this length is made up of hundreds of tiny negotiations that no longer need words. Rather than trying to “act” intimacy, we’ve examined those routines until they begin to feel ordinary. The stillness is the relationship.

The play turns on a promise Betty and John made when they were young. What interests you about the gap between that youthful ideal and the reality of being in their eighties?

Mary and John: The promise was made by two young artists who thought they were being romantic and perhaps slightly grand. But we don’t want to patronise those younger versions of Betty and John. The promise came from something completely sincere. What they couldn’t possibly know was how ordinary and how complicated it would feel decades later - not as a beautiful idea, but standing in a kitchen on a birthday with the kettle on and a carrot cake on the table. The play lives in that distance between the people they imagined themselves becoming and the two actual people who now have to look at that promise honestly. They now know things about love, dependency, fear and simply being alive that their younger selves couldn’t have known. Neither is quite who they promised they would be, and that is where a great deal of the tenderness sits.

You both bring many years of experience to the stage. Does that help in creating the shorthand of a couple who have been together for most of their lives?

Mary: I think experience gives you trust in the rehearsal process, and that gives you confidence to be playful, to explore, to question each other and to make strong choices. This has helped us to try to find the shorthand in such a long relationship. We are finding new things and discovering new ways of being Betty and John together, and I trust that this will continue to grow and develop in performance and throughout the run.

John: I think years of acting teach you to trust another actor. You don’t have to fill every silence or make every moment visible. There’s a shorthand that develops in rehearsal - you begin to recognise what the other person is about to do, or when they need you simply to stay still. That feels very useful when you’re playing two people who have known each other for decades - the trust and experience helps you quickly build a kind of professional familiarity which makes the characters’ own familiarity easier to find.

Do you see the promise at the heart of the play as the ultimate act of love, or as a terrifying test of individual identity?

Mary (Betty): Betty would call it love without hesitation, and that is exactly what makes it difficult. For her, the agreement is one of the truest things they ever made together. But I think Betty believes she’s certain. Whether that certainty survives the actual moment is another question. Holding onto the promise also forces her to ask who she is on her own, outside the marriage, outside the work, outside the idea of “Betty and John.” The play doesn’t let her avoid that.

John (John): John is less certain than he sometimes appears. He made the promise as a statement about the two of them: us, together, always, and now he has to sit with what that asks of him as one individual person. For me it is both things at once. It is an act of love, but also a frightening question about where John ends and the marriage begins. I think John finds himself still discovering that right up to the very end of the play.

The play touches on a delicate and very timely subject. Did you feel a particular responsibility in approaching it?

Mary and John: The responsibility for us is to keep returning to these two people and this particular marriage, rather than turning Betty and John into an argument. Of course, we know audiences will hear the play in the context of conversations happening around us now. But theatre can hold contradictions that a debate sometimes can’t. It would be very easy for a play like this to become a position on something, andwe’ve been disciplined about not doing that. Our job is to be truthful to Betty and John - to their love, their humour, their fear and their uncertainty - and to trust the audience to bring their own lives and experiences to what they see. It is first and foremost the story of a marriage and of two people whose creative lives have helped define who they are. Anything larger is for the audience to feel rather than for us to declare.

Mary Tillett. Photo by Grey Swan/Tim Stubbs Hughes

The subject matter sounds serious, but there is also a lot of warmth and humour in the play. Where does that come from?

Mary and John: The humour isn’t relief from the seriousness. It is the marriage. People who have loved each other for decades tease each other, irritate each other and make each other laugh even on the worst day. Perhaps especially on the worst day. There’s a carrot cake, a birthday candle and a certain amount of domestic disappointment around both of them, and that tells you quite a lot about Betty and John. They rarely express love in a grand way. They look after each other sideways, through routine, teasing, annoyance, and knowing exactly how the other person will respond. The warmth is in the ordinariness, and the ordinariness is where you laugh.

Looking back over your careers, does a piece like this mean something different to you now than it might have done earlier in your working lives?

Mary: I think this piece would be both daunting and exciting for any actor wherever they are in their careers. But inevitably with age comes more personal experience around the themes of the play, and hopefully that helps the truthful playing of it. I am not Betty’s age, but I can relate to her fierce independence, vitality, and deep need to be creative. I think too that one of the things experience teaches you is that doing less can sometimes reveal more. Listening to each other is so important. You become less frightened of silence and perhaps less interested in showing the audience what a character is feeling. You trust that if the thought is really there, people will see it. That makes a two-hander like this very exciting because there is nowhere to hide. You have another actor, the writing and the audience.

John: I think experience changes what you value. You become interested in precision and in listening rather than trying to impose something on a scene. With John, so much depends on what isn’t said. I’m not sure I would have trusted that in quite the same way earlier in my career. There is something very satisfying about reaching a point where a small piece of work between two actors can feel enormous. Quality plays with parts for more mature actors don’t come along very often, so to find myself in such a brilliant piece of new writing featuring two such strong, layeredcharacters, is a genuinely special opportunity.

What do you hope audiences take away from spending an evening with Betty and John?

Mary and John: We hope people stop seeing Betty and John primarily as “an elderly couple” quite quickly. They are simply two people in a marriage facing something enormous together. Older people aren’t a settled question. Betty and John still want things, still argue, still surprise each other, still make each other laugh and still make things. A long marriage isn’t a slow fade. It is a living, negotiating relationship right to the end, with two people still trying to understand themselves and one another. And perhaps we hope audiences think about what it means to spend a lifetime making things - painting, writing, creating - and how deeply that work can become part of your sense of being alive. If people leave feeling that Betty and John still possess every bit of their appetite, contradiction and agency, then we’ve done our job.

and I looked at the sky runs at the Omnibus Theatre in Clapham from 15th September until 3rd October 2026. For tickets visit https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/whatson/and-i-looked-at-the-sky

John Rayment. Photo by Grey Swan/Tim Stubbs Hughes