A Woman of Substance: David Evans enjoys a theatrical depiction of Wagner’s second wife, despite the historical liberties it takes

Review of Cosima, by Sheena Lambert, directed Rex Ryan, Bewley’s Café Theatre, Dublin, 2025.

July 2026, Volume 20, Number 2, 92–3.

Few people would describe Cosima Wagner (née Liszt) as warm and cuddly, or even as a particularly sympathetic human being. Photographs and most contemporary accounts depict her as stern, aloof and rather arrogant. However, as portrayed by Mary Murray in Sheena Lambert’s one-woman play Cosima we are presented with a misunderstood, witty and mischievous closet feminist, badly treated by her father, married off to a dullard and only coming into her own as Richard Wagner’s not particularly secret lover and later, his second wife. The performance is striking from the start.