Mull Theatre, Isle of Mull, 18 April 2009, and touring

Joyce Falconer in Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (© Peter Dibdin)

IF YOU have seen a production of Liz Lochhead’s historical drama, it almost certainly had the actors at one end of the room and the audience at the other. This revival by the National Theatre of Scotland, however, is different. Travelling the Highlands and Islands with its own purpose-built stage and seating unit, the NTS offers a very intimate insight by placing the audience on all four sides of the stage.

Not everything works with this arrangement. There’s a moment early on when Joyce Falconer’s narrator, La Corbie, is summing up Scotland’s personality in all its variety and contradictions, and stops to imitate a “skating minister” – Sir Henry Raeburn’s ‘Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch’.

It’s a line that usually gets the whole room laughing, but here half the audience misses it because the actor has her back to them (not that that halts Falconer, whose dark, gravely performance is one of the show’s highlights).

But there are also some big gains in performing in the round, chief among them a sense of the oppositional forces at play in Lochhead’s script. In Alison Peebles’ feisty, good-looking production, the actors are forced to circle each other on Kenny Miller’s set – with its saltire on the ceiling and St George’s Cross on the floor – which reinforces the play’s mirror images.

We see England set against Scotland; Catholic set against Protestant; male set against female. Above all, we see Mary set against Elizabeth – the first, as played by Jo Freer, a Franco-Scot with chic European style; the second, as played by Angela Darcy, a fiery redhead getting on with the nasty business of ensuring her nation’s dominance over its northern neighbour. The two women never meet, yet their lives are entangled and their temperaments governed by a very similar mixture of political expediency and sexual passion.

In this way, Peebles’ fluid staging gathers a style and rhythm of its own, distinct from the ground-breaking Communicado production in 1987 in which she herself starred, but making the connection between the politics of the 16th century and the character of today’s Scotland in much the same way.

Not every historical detail is clear and the odd scene gets weighed down by the density of the political arguments, but more typically, it is a bright, sensuous and flamboyant staging of a play that has achieved the status of classic within the author’s own lifetime.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Links

• National Theatre of Scotland
• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog