The James Plays

Festival Theatre

4/5

OWING to the approaching Scottish referendum, Rona Munro’s trilogy covering the reigns of the first three King James during the 15th-century emergence of Scotland as a nation are surely landmark productions.

 They’re the centrepiece of the festival’s drama programme and, despite the playwright’s denials, this co-production between the national theatres of Scotland and Great Britain inevitably contributes to the political Yes-No battles gripping Scotland, if not England.

Of course, Munro works under the shadow of Shakespeare, whose great English history cycle also plotted the bloody evolution of society from medieval political chaos to nationhood. 

There are echoes but by the end of James III she and the creative theatre team, led by director Laurie Sansom, have established an independence from the Bard.

Each play centres on three very different royal personalities. The opening The Key Will Keep The Lock focuses on a gentle James I (James McArdle), brought up in captivity in the Tudor court and shoehorned into a resistant and anarchic Scotland, through the second James (Andrew Rothney) — tortured by nightmares of his childhood — to the third James (Jamie Sives), a blithely cruel and self-indulgent egotist treating the kingdom and its subjects as a playground.

Each play too adopts different theatrical styles. The first is a relatively simple narrative as the king finally establishes his authority and control over warring families and the ghost of England’s Henry V, who we see at the opening callously destroying his young prisoner’s self-belief.

The second in the trilogy, Day Of The Innocents, opens with James II’s extended dream of terror as the sleeping king relives the struggle to possess the child, here a manhandled puppet, after his father’s assassination. 

This damaged monarch too has to learn to control by ruthlessly sublimating his own personality to the demands of the crown. 

When he savagely stabs his boyhood friend, now Earl of Douglas, he reveals both a homosexual passionate response to personal betrayal and a need to wipe out all political opposition.

Concluding, The True Mirror — in a near-modern setting — features Sofie Grabel, the star of Danish TV’s The Killing, as James’s Queen Margaret. She takes the reins when he finally and provocatively launches himself into self-destructive hedonism. 

Her address to a Scottish parliament about to descend into civil war — “Will you help me make Scotland’s law?  Will you let me do all I can in her name? ... Then tomorrow we can begin. Together you and I will govern Scotland” — put the wrangling of modern politicians in the shade. 

A warning to Sassenachs who intend to see the plays when they transfer to London shortly — you’ll need surtitles if your Scots is rusty.