Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✭ / ✭✭✭✭✭ / ✭✭✭✭✩
by Rona Munro, directed by Laurie Sansom
National Theatre of Scotland, Luminato Festival, Hearn Theatre, Toronto
June 16-26, 2016
“History Brought to Life”
The centrepiece of the 2016 Luminato Festival is The James Plays by Rona Munro, a trilogy of history plays concerning the rulers of Scotland from 1406 to 1488. The first reason to see the plays is that they are acted by National Theatre of Scotland, one of the greatest theatre ensembles in the world. If you saw the company’s thrilling production of Black Watch at Luminato in 2008, you will want to see them again. The second reason to see the plays is that the stories of the three kings – James I, James II and James III – are fascinating in themselves. You don’t have to be an expert in Scottish history to enjoy them. In fact, Munro, knowing that few people, even Scots, know the history of these rulers, has presented this history as the source of vital, engaging stories that in their examination of personal moral dilemmas has a strong contemporary resonance. The trilogy and the level of performance set the bar to an almost unreachable height for theatre experiences in Ontario this summer.
All three plays premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2014. As a sequence they move from James I: The Key will Keep The Lock the most conventional in Shakespearean terms, in story and presentation, through a balance of conventional and unconventional in James II: Day of the Innocents to James III: The True Mirror, the least conventional of the three. The historical question in all three plays is “How should Scotland be ruled?” The personal question in all three is “What must a person sacrifice in order to insure peace in his or her own household?” It is Munro’s emphasis on this second question that makes the plays so accessible.
In James I, Munro provides a point of reference to Shakespeare’s history plays that immediately establishes the period for us. This is the figure of Henry V (1387-1422), the character known as Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, who triumphs in conquering France when he is king in Henry V. As one might expect, there is no hero-worship in the Scottish view of Henry. His malicious influence on Scottish history, completely ignored in Shakespeare, is his keeping James I (1394-1437), the rightful king of Scotland, captive in England for 18 years. James was not ransomed until Murdac Stewart, the king’s cousin, succeeded his father to the dukedom and became Regent of Scotland.
James’s difficulty in asserting himself as King was that for 18 years the lairds of Scotland had ruled without him. James’s attempt to make the lairds conform to the rule of law thus ran counter to a host of vested interests in a country where Magna Carta did not apply. While Munro depicts Murdac himself as supportive of James’s rule, Murdac’s wife Isabella and her three lawless sons plot James’s downfall.
James I is the most tension-filled play of the trilogy. We can’t see how the unworldly James will ever be able to impose his rule on a populace who doesn’t want it. Meanwhile, except for Murdac himself, the Stewart family makes no effort to conceal their resentment of James and his English wife Joan. The play may be based on history but it is also an edge-of-your-seat thriller.
Steven Miller is excellent at showing James’s gradual development from social and political naiveté to self-assurance and Realpolitik. His scenes of getting to know his arranged bride Joan, a sympathetic Rosemary Boyle, provide a comic counterpoint to the increasingly dire threats arrayed against them. John Stahl gives a magisterial performance as Murdac, a man willing to turn against his own sons for the greater good of the country. Blythe Duff makes a frightening Isabella Stewart, whose hatred of James and Joan simmers beneath malicious hints until it finally bursts into outright threats. Andrew Rothney, Daniel Cahill and especially Ali Craig, who looks and acts like a character from The Road Warrior, create a growing atmosphere of unease as Murdac’s three violent sons. A welcome contrast to Isabella and these three sons comes from Sally Reid as the humorous Meg who becomes Joan’s maid and chief source comfort. Matthew Pidgeon’s bullying and foul-mouthed Henry V is the polar opposite of Shakespeare’s eloquent and charismatic portrait.
In James II, the title character is in a very similar position to that of James I but for a different reason. This James is very like Shakespeare’s Henry VI since he becomes king when only a child, at only six years old after his father is assassinated. Like Henry VI, he becomes the puppet of his powerful counsellors, primarily Alexander Livingston, who are loth to give up their power as the boy grows older.
James II was born with a port-wine birthmark on his face covering his left eye and extending into his forehead. We know now that such a birthmark can be part of Sturge-Weber syndrome which can cause seizures. As depicted by Munro, James II is plagued from childhood with blackouts and recurring nightmares which she shows by repeating images from certain sections of the play in contrast to the straightforward chronology of the action in James I. In fact, much of Act 1 portrays James reliving the events that lead to his friend William Douglas discovering him hiding in a trunk.
Like James I, James II has to learn how to assert his authority over the lairds, but here the task is much more difficult because James is brought up without a full knowledge of what his authority is. The play covers James’s life from age 6 to 22, and his growing perception once he comes of age at 18 that he has become a pawn in a battle among the Douglas family for control of Scotland. One recurring nightmare is gruesome murder of the 6th Earl of Douglas and his young brother at a dinner where they were supposedly invited by the king.
Parallel with James’s rise in power and authority is the similar rise of William Douglas in his. While Douglas’s father had tried to thwart James’s power, William, whose father despised him for his weakness, became James’s best friend. In Munro’s view William suffers in fact from an unrequited love for James. James’s arranged marriage to Marie of Guelders at age 19 and the birth of his first (living) child at at age 21 are shown as severe blows to William, who is not self-aware enough to understand why these happy event should provoke such anger in him. Despair at William’s increasing erratic behaviour finally causes James to send him away from Scotland as a papal ambassador. But this exile only provokes greater despair.
James II provides two of the meatiest roles in the trilogy. Andrew Rothney as James II and Andrew Still as William Douglas both begin the action playing children and then have to show how their initial intense friendship gradually falls apart as James grows into his role as king while William’s desire for things not to change turns into a form of psychosis. Rothney is particularly good at playing James as a child who innocently wants to please his uncles. James’s habit of hiding in a trunk becomes a symbol, however, of a nameless fear that haunts him. Rothney is superb as showing through change of voice and posture how James gradually grows into adulthood.
Andrew Still creates a disturbing portrait of a boy who, despised by his father, finds happiness only in his love and protection of James. Early on we can see that the boys friendship is more one-sided that William thinks it is. Munro does not suggest that William’s homosexuality itself makes him unstable but rather that his inability to understand his feelings or find an outlet for them unbalances him. Still’s depiction of William’s descent into mental illness and self-destructive behaviour is profoundly unsettling.
Other fine performances come from Peter Forbes as William’s father Belvenie – a wimp of a man in James I who becomes a power-hungry brute in James II. Another significant change in character is Blythe Duff’s Isabella Stewart, who is no longer the vigorous villain she was in James I but is now a madwoman chained in a tower, rather like Shakespeare’s Queen Margaret in Richard III. John Stahl puts in another fine performance, this time as Livingston the malicious Regent of Scotland who manipulates the child James until the Douglases depose him.
After showing how both James I and James II had to struggle to assert themselves as king, Munro depicts exactly the opposite situation in James III. This King James is already recognized by everyone as king and revels in his power. The problem is that he has no interest in governing. He puts personal concerns above public concerns even when public concerns include a threatened invasion by England. He gives titles to low-born favourites which alienates the lairds and simply doesn’t care what they think. In this he is like Shakespeare’s Richard II or Marlowe’s Edward II. While Munro showed William Stewart becoming unstable because of sexual frustration, she showed James III as unstable because of his blatant promiscuity. Edward II may have upset the lords because of his male lover Piers Gaveston, but Munro’s James III flaunts his rampant bisexuality in front of the entire court. In one scene his mistress and catamite du jour debate which one he loves more.
Munro’s James III takes a turn quite unlike that of either Richard II or Edward II in its focus on James’s Danish wife, Queen Margaret. While the people despise James, they adore Margaret and historians agree that she was the better ruler. Expanding on this, Munro depicts Margaret as de facto ruler of the country while James ignores his royal duties in favour of increasingly bizarre artistic pursuits. Her diligence and aptitude for governing bring her to the attention of Lord John, Head of the Privy Counsel. James won’t listen to him, but Margaret will and will act on his suggestions. Matters reach a crisis when James in a typical act of caprice disinherits his first-born son James in favour of his second-born son Ross.
In both James I and James II, Munro shows central characters who learn how to keep order in their household which is Scotland. The same is true in James III except that the title king is the prime source of disorder in the country. Here it is Margaret, who has to make the journey. When we first meet her she is one of James’s adornments, a woman who dresses in the height of fashion and luxury. As the action progresses, Margaret comes to see herself as more than that. She gradually becomes aware that her “helping” James along with treasury accounts and diplomatic documents is vital to the country’s welfare and with that awareness comes a growing intolerance for James’s selfish and erratic behaviour. How she will deal with James’s apparent madness, John’s growing attraction to her and his attempts to turn young James against his father become the main focus of the action.
In James I and James II occasional humour helps offset the generally sombre tone of the play. In James III, Munro allows the tone to become so satirical that it threatens to override the more serious themes of the play. While the previous two plays were tautly written, James III has a number of unnecessary scenes. It’s bad enough to have James tell Margaret that he wants a choir to accompany him at all times, but we really don’t need to see this choir in action on two later occasions. Munro does bring James III and with it the entire trilogy to a satisfactory conclusion, but not without raising serious doubts whether she actually will be able to do it.
James III offers two substantial roles in the title character and in Margaret. Matthew Pidgeon plays James as a man with borderline personality disorder which includes his sex addiction. BPD is especially evident in James’s alternation between idealizing and devaluing Margaret. Playing James’s bizarre behaviour as part of a general mental instability does not allow us to sympathize with him but it does allow us to recognize that James is suffering from a condition he cannot change. The result is that Pidgeon’s James appears trapped in his own mind and caught up in fantasies that have little to do with the world around him. The wild stare, wicked smile and hectic movement Pidgeon gives James makes James appear to be reacting to a different reality.
This is especially fitting since the central image of the play is a new Venetian glass mirror that for once allows people to see themselves as they truly are. It makes sense that the two characters with delusions of grandeur, James and the laundress Daisy (Fiona Wood), are also the only two who want to dismiss what they see in the mirror. Yet, despite James’s outrageous behaviour, Pidgeon convinces us that James’s love for Margaret is real and that an underlying sense of worthlessness, compared to her perfection, is what drives his ultimate self-destructiveness.
In the original production of The James Plays, Margaret was played by Danish actor Sofie Gråbøl. For this tour Swedish actor Malin Crépin takes it on. While it may be right to cast a Scandinavian actor to play a Danish character, it does mean, at least in Crépin’s case, that the actor stands out from the rest of the tight-knit ensemble. This may be on purpose since Munro deliberately views Margaret as a woman far ahead of her time. Crépin makes Margaret’s transformation from superficiality and dependence to seriousness and independence quite clear. Yet, no matter how good her English is, Crépin, fine actor that she is, is not able to convey levels of nuance as effortlessly as the others who are acting in their native language and accent.
As Lord John, Head of the Privy Council, Ali Craig gives an especially subtle performance. Besides Margaret, John seems to be the only level-headed, uncorrupted member of the court. Yet, step by step, Craig shows how John shifts from purely altruistic motives in seeing Margaret to selfish ones as it becomes more difficult to keep his desire in check.
Blythe Diff, this time playing the elderly Annabella, James’s aunt, provokes a hearty, earthy sense of humour that provides a much needed counterweight to the comedy of excess and embarrassment of James. Fiona Wood has the full measure of the once-innocent laundress Daisy, who, under James’s malign influence soon dons an inappropriate air of superiority. As James’s son James, Daniel Cahill grows up before our eyes from a young boy who cries when his father rejects him to a young man ready to seek revenge for past insults.
Rona Munro has written the plays in contemporary English spiced with a good handful of Scots vocabulary. The language can shift from vulgar to poetic in a moment but, unlike Shakespeare does not express itself in extended imagery. Instead the imagery in the play is primarily concrete and visual. An image central to the first two plays, less so in the third, is the kist or trunk. In James I, Isabella tells Queen Joan the many uses of a kist. It can not only store secrets but can be used for barring doors or casting from windows onto enemies. In James II, the kist becomes the young James’s main place to retreat from the world when he feels insecure. In James III, the kist is the storing place for fabrics in the three primary colour about which James and Margaret dispute as about everything else essential.
In a larger sense, all three Jameses enter their plays confined in different types of kist. The troubles of James I’s reign stem from his actually having been confined for 18 years; those of James II from his having been trapped by accession to kingship at so young an age; and those of James III from being caught in the confused meshes inside his head. Thus, the imagery in the trilogy traces entrapment in place, in time and in the mind.
A second series of images that unites the plays are various items of jewelry. Throughout the trilogy rings, bracelets and necklaces are identified with important figures in the play. At the very end, the young man soon to be James IV is ceremonially given each of these items and reminded of its significance so that he as King of Scotland will bear both physically and symbolically the entire history of his country with him to his coronation.
Sansom the director and Bausor the designer have decided that the situations Munro’s play depict may derive from history but are ultimately timeless. Therefore, each play of the trilogy is set in a different period. James I is set in the time of the action and begins with Medieval plainchant and uses the earthy tones of a Breughel painting of peasants. James II features art songs and is set in the all-black world of the Jacobean period, the time when a Scottish king became King of England. James III begins with a folk band playing Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” and dresses the cast in a wide range of 21st-century styles, from the dowdy to the avant-garde and in colours from the greys and pastels of the more sensible characters to the bright primary colours of James III and Margaret. In the colour symbolism of this play Margaret is first seen in red. Later she gives up that colour when James claims it as his own along with yellow, and she instead triumphantly adopts the colour blue that he had previously rejected.
This is a masterful work beautifully produced, insightfully directed and bursting with extraordinary performances. I saw the plays all on one day and am glad I did because each play makes you long to see the next one right away to learn more of the story. Munro’s view of Scottish history takes neither a tragic nor a triumphalist tone. Rather it is ironic. The will of every ruler is hampered by the constraints that have marked him before he rules and by the constraints that form when he tries to rule. This ironic tone jibes well with our modern sensibility and makes it easy to see parallels to the events in the play both in contemporary politics and in everyday life. In light of this, the only visit of The James Plays to North America, let’s hope they inspire the classical theatre companies of Canada not to rest on their laurels but to strive in their ensembles for at least the same uniformly incisive style of acting, the same unanimity of purpose and the same expansiveness of vision that the National Theatre of Scotland so amply demonstrates.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Steven Miller as James I, Andrew Rothney as James II and Matthew Pidgeon as James III, ©2015 David Eustace; Steven Miller (in burgundy) and ensemble, ©2015 Russell Millard; Daniel Cahill and Andrew Rothney; Matthew Pidgeon and Malin Crépin as Margaret; Steven Miller as James I. ©2015 Tommy Ga-Ken.
For tickets, visit https://luminatofestival.com.
2016-06-21
The James Plays