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Theatre Review This could be Scotland now

With all the real events happening offstage, the delivery is flawed, writes MARY CONWAY

Mary
Hampstead Theatre, London NW3

ANYONE who has seen Rona Munro’s award-winning historical trilogy The James Plays will be hugely excited at the prospect of this follow-up work which premieres at Hampstead Theatre.

In the play Mary, we move on from the turmoil of James I, II and III of Scotland and plunge into the divided land of Mary Queen of Scots.

The eponymous Mary herself, though, never features as a character on stage, and here the playwright — having set up an expectation — takes an enormous risk by giving us instead a cast of three lesser mortals, whose challenging task it is to illuminate Mary’s story while engaging us also in theirs.

The story itself is a knockout. And what Munro does so well is to place us at this tipping point in Scottish history and make us look at it anew.

Not content with familiar tales of the past, she transports us to 16th century Edinburgh where the present is on a knife edge, the reality of Mary’s treatment shocking, and the future under construction bit by bit.

This could be today or any day; this could be Scotland now. But with all the real events happening offstage, the delivery is flawed.

Admittedly, Douglas Henshall holds the stage magnificently as Mary’s vehement supporter James Melville, and Brian Vernel as Thompson, a political operator rising from the servant ranks, matches him with formidable power for one so young.

Rona Morison too oozes youth and passion in the one essential female role of Agnes.

But it’s an uphill task for the actors, who are spectacularly upstaged: first by the potency of our imagined Mary, then by the drama offstage that eclipses their own journey, also by Ashley Martin-Davis’s heavy set that dwarfs them on this all too spacious stage, and lastly by the emotional investment of an audience who care less for them as characters than for the raging world outside which they ardently discuss.

If director Roxana Silbert had created a more intimate setting for these three characters, we might have engaged more with them.

As it is, streams of debate and discussion from static positions deny the actors the chance to evolve.

Melville is too cowed too early and Agnes is too fluent and assertive to be believable as a servant.

Meanwhile, the slight political struggle shown onstage can’t possibly compete for audience attention with the offstage maelstrom of contemporary politics and the ghastly ill-treatment of a beautiful woman at the hands of power-hungry men.

Mary Queen of Scots, Munro bravely reminds us, has always been and will always be a blurred image around which vivid rumours rise and fall.  

Seen variously by those who watch her as soul of Scotland, love object, accomplice to murder, devilish Catholic, French devotee and harlot, Mary emerges finally as rape victim and dispensable bauble in the fearsome march of progress led by men.

A powerful and frighteningly real tale but ultimately a vicarious experience for the audience… which is a pity from a playwright of such talent.

Runs until November 26 2022. Box office: (020) 7722-9301, www.hampsteadtheatre.com.

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