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The James Plays (NHB Modern Plays)

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I am currently in rehearsal with the most extraordinary company of actors in the longest, most challenging, most terrifying and most exhilarating rehearsal process I have ever experienced. The second instalment is initially structured like a recurring nightmare, with James II (Daniel Cahill), a boy-king with a strawberry naevus on his face, tossed like a rag-doll between vying factions. Chief among them is the Douglas clan and its acquisitive patriarch (Peter Forbes), who at length poisons his son (Andrew Still), the king's childhood friend, with ambition. Costume suggests the medieval but with some modern touches that serve as reminder of the contemporary relevance of this struggle for Scottish governance, identity and independence. Language embraces full-bloodied modern vernacular as well as having a Scots emphasis and accent that may sometimes challenge an English audience. Shades of soap opera surface, but the play's tragic ambit resonates – it's almost as if Prince Hal had spent his youth playing around with Hotspur instead of Falstaff. Jon Bausor’s design creates an area that feels like a gunnery platform with a raised bank of audience set on stage mirroring the Olivier’s circle and make something halfway between traverse and in-the-round. It will also be used by the actors and the royal throne is set there, dominantly high, symbolically and physically. A huge sword, its point driven into the pavement, rises above the action: it represents the blade that is cited as the solution of dissension. It will run blood, burst into flame or flash brightly at times in the action.

With Mary, James’s Queen (Stephanie Hyam) and the king’s sister Arabella (Rona Morison) supportive, things seem set for more peaceful times, but James puts distance between himself and William to exert his kingship and William sees his ambitions thwarted and refuses to extract himself from alliance with some other nobles. Their friendship ends in savage violence. Yet let's not get festivalitis, particularly likely to be contracted by audiences and critics who have sat through a long drama – this lasts nigh on nine hours – and need to justify the spending of their time. This is an ambitious enterprise, studded with vivacious episodes, sometimes delighting with the information it has quarried. Yet it rarely startles with its view of Scotland and politics. More surprisingly, from the author of the searing prison drama Iron, its dialogue is often flatly demotic. You get an arc and a roll from this trilogy, you get recurring themes, and a great and welcome line of mighty women. But you get little texture in the language, or psychological intricacy. The second play builds on these themes. James II is a boy King with a blemished face, who is manipulated by the cruel Lord Livingstone to sign off policies ‘in the King’s name’, a motif that haunts the play. The play expands on the first’s themes of psychological conflict, James’ night terrors providing intense if confusing dream sequences, giving the audience an insight into the King’s mind. Like the first play, ‘James II: Day of the Innocents’ shows a conflicted Scotland, one of virtue being eroded by corrupt and powerful noblemen. Once again the use of the physical is sublime; a scene in which the King’s family takes on the Douglases in a game of ball looks so natural, but must have been painstakingly prepared for.As Parliament and nobles show increasing dissatisfaction with the King, Margaret sets out to mend affairs by convincing him he must apologise to Parliament. She appears to have succeeded, but, when the King appears, apparently contrite, he flares up and scandalises them by his behaviour. James III: The True Mirror (****) stars Sofie Gråbøl – Sarah Lund of The Killing – and she is expertly cast as Queen Margaret, the Danish wife of James III (Jamie Sives from Game of Thrones, a charismatic presence), whose court was marked by cronyism and his neglectful rule as he pursued a hilariously hedonistic lifestyle, which included having a choir following him around. They have a sparky, passionate relationship and the onstage chemistry between Grabol and Sives ( pictured right by Robert Day) has real fizz. James McArdle shows his cultured, gentle James develop in political cunning and cold determination to change Scotland from a country of competing factions into one ruled by law with a king who wields real power, aided by the clever support of Stephanie Hyam’s Joan, an English noblewoman whom he met only on their wedding day. Bold and irreverent storytelling explores the complex character of this colourful Stewart king – a poet, a lover, a law-maker but also the product of a harsh political system. Premiering at the Edinburgh International festival in 2014, it’s interesting to consider what aspects haven’t easily translated to an Australian context. The story of James I delves heavily into the relationship between England and Scotland, with Munro’s script written as an overt rebuttal to Scotland’s history left out of a theatrical canon dominated by Shakespeare, while the debate over Scottish independence rages on. The work, of course, is much bigger than that and the tensions and emotions grasp the audience clearly and firmly, but with The James Plays being the theatrical centerpiece of David Sefton’s final Adelaide festival I could not help but wonder where the Australian stories of this scale are.

Competing lords at first control him until another Douglas, known here as Balvenie, sets up their arrest and sudden execution. Greedy Balvenie (Peter Forbes, malevolently dissembling) gains James’s trust. He has his own eye on the throne. His son William doesn’t want the crown and is the King’s best friend. The artists are, she thinks, a needless expense, while the new courtiers might lead to her being “ostracised and pushed out of the tree”. This cycle of history plays chronicling the reigns of three of Scotland's Stewart Kings premiered in the advent of the Scottish Independence referendum in 2014. Reading them in the wake of that, as I first did, they seemed like an attempt to create a canon of Scottish history plays, one that could compete with the Henriad as an exploration of what a nation could be represented as, how we portray our rulers, and the people that surround them. It seemed fiercely independent, and pro-independence. And it is all that. The fact that the new NTS was named as it was rather than the Scottish National Theatre was making a subtle but significant semantic point that was also political. Being of Scotland spoke of inclusion and diversity. First, James I is returned to Scotland after 18 years held hostage in England with his young English wife, Joan, who finds herself unhappy in Scotland and terrified in the marital bed. Then, James II is witness to his father’s death and separated from his mother as a boy. Unable to cope, his world becomes a nightmare and he is gripped by fear except when in the arms of his best friend, Will, and then his French wife, Mary. James III is rakish and philandering, distrusted by his court and blind to the powers of his wife Margaret, Queen of Scots.If you signed up within the Roku channel, follow the steps here: https://support.roku.com/article/208756478-how-do-i-manage-or-cancel-a-subscription the company would not be based in an existing theatre, but would be something they defined as a theatre without walls, it sounded as radical a notion as it remains ten years on. At times it seemed as if a new NTS production was opening somewhere in some country or other every week. If this is what a collaboration between our two National Theatres can produce, may there be much more of it. Despite all the slaughter and machismo, there's enough room for gentle cross-cultural comedy. Munro writes wonderful female parts, and scenes between James' highly-strung English bride (Rosemary Boyle) and her earthy Scottish lady-in-waiting (Sally Reid) showcase the play's Scottish humour – self-deprecating, full of gruff defiance, and mischievously energised by the current political climate.

Playwright Rona Munro’s dialogue is firmly contemporary. Director Laurie Sansom pulls each successive play closer to our time – in the first, under traditional costumes, we get glances at modern shoes; by the third we have a mishmash of the traditional and the firmly contemporary. In the first we have bagpipes; in the third we have Lady Gaga. Stories of the past are as much of our world today as the history we relegate them to. When Featherstone left the NTS to take over the artistic directorship of the Royal Court Theatre in London, she was replaced by Laurie Sansom, who had previously brought his production of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Edinburgh while artistic director of the Royal & Derngate Theatre in Northampton. These boisterous, bracing, subtly thought-provoking and hugely entertaining plays are also a rarity in offering a new history cycle to accompany those of Shakespeare. While the period covered is virtually concurrent with Shakespeare’s 16th-century cycles, the gaze is northward, upon an unfamiliar trio of kings, and marked by a contemporary vernacular that makes the work refreshingly accessible. James II: Day of the Innocents focuses on a young king (Andrew Rothney) plagued by nightmares from childhood and now in thrall to ambitious noblemen jostling for control of the country in his name; the puppet used to represent his childhood is apt for someone who is now a puppet king. A new French wife, Mary (Hyam again), gives James the courage to exert his authority, only for his best friend’s jealousy to signal another crisis. Both of these factors are a source of grievance for Dame Phemy, who is, the actor says, a “vile” character. A time-served, senior official in the royal household, Phemy is accustomed to having high status and considerable power within the royal household.

First night reviews

Growing up alone, abandoned by his mother and separated from his sisters, James II is little better than a puppet. If you signed up within an Apple iOS or Apple TV app, follow the steps here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202039 Music with a Celtic lilt, songs that draw on medieval poems, including some writ by royal hand, and the thundering drums of war provide a sound score that creates a poignant atmosphere and carries one scene on to another in a swift-flowing production. But Scotland's future will be decided by the woman who loves him best of all: his resourceful and resilient wife, Queen Margaret of Denmark. James II: Day of the Innocentsdepicts a violent royal playground from the perspective of the child King and his contemporaries, in a terrifying arena of sharp teeth and long knives.

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