Adelaide Festival. Presented by the National Theatre of Scotland, National Theatre of Great Britain and Edinburgh International Festival. Festival Centre. 28 Feb 16

 

To be seen as one vast experience or as three separate pieces of theatre. That is the question.

 

A 12-hour epic, three stories with two meal breaks, is a good choice for it becomes intensely immersive and the sheer endurance factor complements the timescale of the Scots history being played out on stage.  It tells of the brutal days of the 15th century, of royal accession evolving through a landscape of conspiracy, bloodshed, and arranged marriages. These were times of clan thrusts for territory and power, poverty in the land, and attenuated brutal clashes with England. The House of Stewart is born of deceit, greed, and kings groomed and crowned as small children.  The plays are a modern construct by Rona Munro who has taken the bones of recorded history and fleshed out the characters and conflicts using contemporary dialogue which brings home vividly the sense that yesterday's people were much like us.

 

The Scots and English actors, under the direction of Laurie Sansom, play out the histories on a great dark stage shafted through by a giant sword. Props as simple as chests and tables are rolled on and off but it is a might of wondrous lighting designed by Philip Gladwell which carries the atmosphere and tension. Then there are the startling and booming evocations of the soundscape and the ferocious grating as the huge drawbridge grinds open on its links of chain. 

A section of audience sits aloft on scaffolding at the back of the stage, shadowy witnesses to the unfolding dramas. Lithe actors dash up and down the castle stairs around them, squeezing past the legs of the front rows as if they are just stones in a battlement.

 

James I

The Key will keep the Lock

 

The king is a boy who has been imprisoned for most of his life in England. He is liberated by a fierce King Henry V who ensures that the boy knows that authority is the product of violence. Young James, whose world has been a prison room with a view into a garden below, is of gentler disposition and inclined to poetic reflection on the world around him. Not a great match for the stomping, hard-drinking clansmen who must pass for Scottish courtiers.

His young English bride arrives with abilities to manage an aristocratic English household but is quite unprepared for the rude intimacy of Scots castle life, let alone the grinding poverty which James must overcome if he is to pay back the British crown the ransom demanded for his liberation. 

 

This is a play of nasty characters, jealous-thug relatives ready to kill at the first opportunity, ready to apply sadistic punishments to neighbours who simply irritate them. It is also a tale of sad tenderness from the young king toward his wife and for her, a tragedy of good breeding downtrodden by a coarse culture.

 

There is much terrible violence. The stage seems to be awash with blood. It oozes down the giant sword.

 

The performances are gripping and superb: Steven Millar plays James I;  Rosemary Boyle makes a sweet Queen Joan; John Stahl gives us the fierce Murdac Stewart, powerful regent of Scotland, a man perhaps with a conscience; and Blythe Duff plays his sarcastic, spiteful and precipitately dangerous wife, Isabella Stewart.  Her three sons are the loose cannons of the plot, the family insiders who are simply thugs.  Matthew Pidgeon is a power as the dying Henry V.  Sally Reid is a power of a different kind as the Scots retainer dispatched to attend the new queen.

 

James II

Day of the Innocents

 

In which the critic moves from auditorium seating to sit on the stage seating, looking down upon the actors.

Since they are all around, up on central stage platforms, walking through the stage audience and moving in all directions on the stage beneath, it is not a bad vantage point. It has an added sense of dramatic immediacy since the seating trembles as actor’s pound up stairs, the drums thunder from behind, or the great drawbridge grinds open.

 

This is the play in which the king starts out as a perplexed six-year-old with a dramatic port-wine stain on his face. Abandoned by his mother, he is puppet to the powerful Earls and keepers of castles Edinburgh and Stirling. His only refuge is a large box wherein he hides. The Douglas family has risen and is challenging the throne. Young William Douglas emerges to become his friend and playmate, a relationship which grows in complexity, rivalry and, indeed, homosexual tension, as the years roll forth. James lives in a net of cruel and violent men. He is plagued by nightmares. The only compassion is from the women, old Meg, his sister, and his young wife. 

 

The great ensemble cast members move into new characters. Some follow through. Blythe Duff sustains the maternal passion and venom of Isabella Stewart, now in chains, her sons all gone. She is indomitable and becomes a strange oracle as the oldest living voice the young king knows. Andrew Rothney plays James II, compelling all the way from frightened child to mature monarch. John Stahl re-embodies the role as the powerful Livingston, Keeper of Stirling Castle, while Peter Forbes continues, now older and ruthlessly entrenched as Balvenie of the Douglas family, a character who gives domestic violence a whole new meaning.

 

James III

The True Mirror

 

Rona Munro has injected plenty of comic moments and ironic humour into these plays and, one discovers, they are realised better from the front of the house than from the stage seating.

In the end of the day, the auditorium is the place best to enjoy the James Plays, albeit "enjoy" is not quite the word for the apprehension, suspense and repulsion that much of the action evokes.

 

James III is the softest of the plays. It focuses on the women of the court. It dips behind the scenes of those cold, stone castles where queens and servants co-exist, where fashion and perfume are important.

 

The King now is a vapid fellow, puffed with self-importance. He commands a court with theatricality and glamour. He thinks big. Increasingly, the power players in his court are losing tolerance. He is riding towards a fall and it is his elegant Danish wife, Queen Margaret, who rises to offer stately authority to Scotland.

 

The plays each are entities in themselves but they run forwards like a suspense series when seen in concert. Their pace is swift and hard-hitting with tight direction and the cast is truly ensemble. The choreography in both dance and battle is superlative.  

 

James I is so tight and well-wrought one simply can't work out where the time went.

James II's ending is attenuated with the great emotional denouement between William Douglas and James. Their relationship is so fraught, so complex and so doomed, superbly realised by Andrew Still and Andrew Rothney. 

In James III, the arrival of the fabulous new modern mirror is at first most diverting. But motives are never nice in these plays. Even a mirror can be used as a weapon. From the lightness and humour, darkness descends again. Danger is relentless.

And, after having whooped to their feet for a third grand ovation, the audience members disperse into the night, not as much elated by the brilliance of the experience as they are utterly drained by immersion in the ugliness of political power play, a world of back-stabbing duplicity which is still around but just in a less bloody form.

 

Samela Harris

 

When:

James I: Closed.

James II: 1 Mar

James III: 1 Mar

Where: Adelaide Festival Theatre

Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au