The James Plays
The three James plays by Rona Munro were first
performed at the 2014 Edinburgh International Festival and were a co-production
of the National Theatre of Scotland and the National Theatre (of Great
Britain). I saw them in (technically) the wrong order at the National Theatre
in London. As this affected my responses I shall discuss them in the order in
which I saw them.
Essentially the same set served for the three plays,
with subtle variations in the details. On the Olivier stage, extra seats were
built at the back so that audience members could be all around the actors, and
also those in these seats could in some senses be seen as the ‘third estate’
when parliaments were called (actors often used the aisles at the back and
front of these seating areas). There was a huge dagger or sword implanted in
the main acting area.
James II: Day of the Innocents (seen October 7)
The play opens with the young James II hiding in a
travelling chest and having nightmares; his nurse is searching for him and his
friend William Douglas comforting him. This scene is played out more than once,
indicating that it is a generic experience in the young king’s life. The whole
first act is a meditation on the massive insecurity of the young king’s life as
his mother and then various aristocratic factions attempt to maintain
guardianship of him.
The means of displaying this are to have the actors
playing James and William enact the childish a well as the adult roles; but
also the young James is represented by a bunraku puppet, identified with the
adult king by the shared birthmark which covers half his face as with a
bloodstain. The conceit works well to indicate the fragility of the child, but
it is over used and is somewhat too obvious, after its initial impact, as a
marker of when we are supposed to imagine James as a child, and when as a
teenager or young man taking on his full authority. As the actor is invariably
on stage with the puppet, voicing the part, but William does not have a
corresponding puppet, the technical representation of the child scenes becomes
too laboured. The opening scene is replayed word for word at the conclusion of
the act, which certainly emphasises the sense of claustrophobic and damaged
childhood, but total repetition of a scene lasting several minutes is not
really dramatically effective.
The play comes into its own in the second act, where
the puppet is dispensed with and the king is an adult. The swirling animosities
of the court, including the ravings of Isabella (the excellent Blythe Duff), a
perpetual prisoner mourning the loss of her sons and cursing the king for his
father’s part in their murder, focus eventually on the notorious occasion when
the king murdered the young Earl of Douglas (his friend William now grown into
his inheritance), by stabbing him at dinner. This scene, though wordy as the
Earl boasts of his right to independent action, assuming that he can have an
almost jokey discussion of the issues with his childhood friend, becomes
harrowing as the king finally explodes and repeatedly stabs the Earl in a
vicious frenzy.
The cast: excellent – the Andrew Rothney as the king and
Mark Rowley as William Douglas believable as young friends whose adult
experiences cause a fatal estrangement and misunderstanding; both James’s mother
and his queen played by Stephanie Hyam, but so distinctly as characters that it
is easier to imagine two actresses are taking the two parts; the supporting
characters well delineated considering the general unfamiliarity of the
audience with the personalities involved.
James I: The Key Will Keep the Lock (seen October 8)
The play opens with rhythmic chanting and singing by
all the cast in an evocation of Scots medieval celebration. This is an
extremely strong opening for the trilogy, but seen out of order, after the
intimacy of the second play’s opening, it is even more striking; I was at once
aware that the three plays would not be constructed in similar ways.
Indeed the childhood of James I, kept prisoner by the
English kings for eighteen years from the age of ten, is only alluded to, and
not represented on stage at all; we first see the king as a man in his twenties
still at the beck and call of a thuggish and unprepossessing Henry V, who
taunts his unfitness to be a king – or even a man strong enough to wrestle
another (Henry himself) to the ground. He imagines he can send James back to
Scotland with an English wife as a mere puppet for his own policies, as part of
his attempt to safeguard England for his own young son after his approaching
death.
James is not destined to be a puppet. James McArdle,
in a magnificent display of determination, patriotism and stumbling oratory,
imposes his will on the recalcitrant Scottish lairds, convincing them that it
is appropriate they kneel to him despite their initial conviction that such an
action is totally unacceptable.
Previously, the meeting and marriage with Joan shows a
hesitant and sensitive man at sea in his emotions, and a brisk and self-assured
young woman non-plussed by her new husband’s expectation that she should
actually have read the love poems he has sent (which she assumes are
conventional and commissioned). Only much later, after an excruciating wedding
night in which the consummation must be witnessed by a pack of boorish lords,
and a period of appalled residence in Scotland, does she realise that James
has written his own poems, and that they refer directly to the fact that he saw
and treasured the sight of her from his prison, and could not believe his luck
that Henry had assigned her to him. McArdle and Hyam play these scenes with an
extraordinary delicacy. They are balanced by the richly comic scenes between
the queen and Meg (Sarah Higgins), her Scottish lady in waiting.
High-minded and principled government from the new
king fall foul of the rapaciousness and boorishness of the court, exemplified
in the unruly Stewart cousins. The now-displaced regent allows James to arrest
his own sons, but one escapes and raises rebellion; the king realises that the
logic of his position impels him to execute the cousins and their father,
leaving their mother mourning her lost boys as she sees their souls embodied in
the seabirds around her prison tower; she becomes the raving prisoner of the
second play. In warring upon his nobles, James personally dispatches the leader
who has transmogrified into the ghost of the English king whom he could not
wrestle to the ground as a young man.
The appalling murder of the king is not enacted in the
play, though it is described graphically during the opening scenes of the second
play, in which it always remains an open question whether the young James II
witnessed it, or was at least close by.
This first play is immensely more powerful than the
second play, both because of its structure and because the political issues are
dealt with more successfully in tandem with the personal story of the king and
his queen reaching a tender but fragile rapprochement after the
misunderstandings and traumas of their initial months together. James McArdle’s
performance as the king was deeply moving, developing from gaucheness to
confidence on both the personal and political front, and demonstrating this by
an eloquence frequently caught short by a strangled hesitation while searching
for the right words. The speech of love for Scotland and the speeches of love
and regard for his wife – hardly possible to know which were more affecting.
James III: The True Mirror (seen October 9)
The play opens with the cast dancing in quite a modern
fashion, dressed smartly in suits (or kilts) and evening gowns; immediately the
atmosphere is shockingly different from the two earlier plays, which have been
grounded in more ‘late medieval’ visual styles. One then notices flowers
growing along the trellises on the set (roses originally planted by James I for
his queen), and rich hangings on the vertical spaces, denoting a far more
luxurious and potentially more civilised court.
But the situation is by no means so uplifting. The
king (Jamie Sives) is a self-absorbed horror, squandering whatever loyalty and
affection his family and court might offer by his wilful meanness, his contempt
for his queen and his sons, and his favouritism towards servants. His Danish
queen, superbly played by Sofie Gråbøl, attempts at first to maintain a united
front with her husband but eventually insists on a separation, which the king
grants in a casually brutal fashion. The awfulness of the disintegration of a
family, with tension suddenly frozen into aggressive separation, and children’s
loyalties hopelessly confused and conflicted, is suddenly writ large in the
Scottish Royal family, and it remains hard to tell whether James himself is
really affected, or whether it is all part of the game.
This ambiguity continues to flow around him, rendering
all attempts to govern by precedent and protocol hopelessly vitiated by the
king’s capriciousness. The queen and her elder son are eventually forced to
declare the king unfit to rule, and he is eventually killed; in this version of
the events, by his own son.
The queen delivers an astonishing speech to persuade
the parliament that she is fit and ready to govern in the interim, delivered
with an amazing conviction and dignity. While inevitably it resonates with
modern applicability in relation to the recent referendum for Scottish
independence, which slightly breaks the spell of the dramatic moment, it
nonetheless ranks with the great speech on Scotland delivered in the first play
by the newly-returned James I.
The play closes with the new king, James IV, lamenting
his betrayal and murder of his father. He strips naked and ties thorn bushes to
his body. His great-aunt (the sister of James II, now in this play acted by
Blythe Duff) re-clothes him while giving a speech of immense compassion and
worldly wisdom about kingly responsibility and guilt. Thus prepared, King James
IV leaves the stage in a blaze of light and acclamation; the irony being that
we know (or we should know) that all will bleed to nothing on the field of
Flodden.
The TLS reviewer of the Donmar’s revival of Kevin
Elyot’s play ‘My Night with Reg’ remarked that nudity on stage “makes voyeurs
of us all”, destroying the audience’s engagement with the drama by distracting
them (“always looking in two places”). I am not sure that this is universally
true; on the Olivier stage, at any rate, unless one is particularly near the
front, there is not a great opportunity to be voyeuristic; also the context of
the nudity may mitigate its salacious effect (if any). Here the scene began as
an act of (possibly masochistic) contrition, and then became ritualistic as
Annabella Stewart reclothed the young king and prepared him for his coronation
by adorning him with jewels belonging to his parents, grandparents and
great-grandparents, emphasising the continuity as well as the frailty of the
dynasty.
In contrast, the brief nude scene in ‘My Night with
Reg’ clearly follows on from a night which two of the characters spend together
in bed. There was once a reference in this connection to there being a ‘thank
you for coming to see the play’ to the gay members of an audience when a comely
young man appears without clothes on stage. (I am not sure now if it was
referring to Elyot’s play.) And of course, the Donmar is a far more intimate
theatre.
General Thoughts
It would doubtless have been better to have seen the pays
in the correct order – even more so, to have seen them all on one day. The
contrasting tones and styles of the three plays would be best served by the
chronological approach, moving from the medieval energy of the opening of play
one, through its tough political manoeuvring and increasingly personal
engagement between the king and queen, to the more intimate psychodrama of play
two, and then to the extraordinary decadence of the supposedly Renaissance-like
court of play three where the king appears at times a self-deluded playboy and
at times a panicked and lonely individual unable to connect meaningfully with
anyone at all.
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