The James Plays (NHB Modern Plays)

Product Information

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. Munro contributed eight dramas to Radio 4's Stanley Baxter Playhouse: First Impressions, Wheeling Them In, The King's Kilt, Pasta Alfreddo at Cafe Alessandro, The Man in the Garden, The Porter's Story, The German Pilot and The Spider. 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. 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.

Charismatic, cultured, and obsessed with grandiose schemes that his nation can ill afford, James III is by turns loved and loathed. Scotland thunders dangerously close to civil war, but its future may be decided by James' resourceful and resilient wife, Queen Margaret of Denmark. Her love and clear vision can save a fragile monarchy and rescue a struggling people. The final chapter is the strongest and most free. James III is portrayed through the veneer of the sexual invective against him – an irresponsible, flamboyant and promiscuous man-boy, shirking the business of government, and refusing point-blank to change.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. All of this makes for a character who is both a killjoy and a xenophobe. The Moors, Duff comments, “don’t really look like her and they don’t speak like her”. If you enjoy these plays at all you should understand that I owe a debt to a series of theatre companies and other organisations who support and develop new writing for the stage and who have allowed me to grow to the point where I felt able to go for the big dream. As dreams battle brutal realities and the nation thunders dangerously close to regicide and civil war, her true love and clear vision offer the only protection that can save a fragile monarchy and rescue a struggling people.

Ian McDiarmid appeared in his own adaptation of Andrew O'Hagan's novel, Be Near Me. O'Hagan's non-fiction book, The Missing, was also adapted for the stage. That’s a bit harsh, but perhaps Munro is suggesting a people as conflicted about their own place in the world in the 16 th century as the voting in the referendum suggests they still are today. The eponymous mirror of the final play (a novelty for the period) is a gift from the king to his wife, in which numerous characters confront images of themselves they hadn’t seen – older, younger, prettier, uglier than they had imagined; the effect for some is empowering, for others disabling, while the mirror held up to Scotland by the plays themselves may suggest different things to different Scots in the audience. The James plays then thankfully achieve most of this with a lot of credibility, and set the benchmark for how history plays should be presented to a 21st century audience. They are abound with wonderful, complex personal relationships, as well as exploring grand themes of nationhood or what it means to belong to Scotland, arguments that have raced across time and are still so pertinent now.Shakespeare covered English events in his Henry VI plays and Richard III, but this is easier going than his overload of feuding Dukes and Earls and unashamedly propagandist pitch for the new Tudor dynasty. Scotland’s somewhat similar ruthless competition for power seems more clear-cut as a struggle between a self-aggrandising nobility and the establishment of royal rule, at least as these plays present it. She is helped by wonderful acting (give or take the odd mumble) from a cast most of whom play more than one character in the trilogy– and while it's invidious to mention just a few in such an ensemble, the standout performances, in addition to those already mentioned, come from Sarah Higgins as Meg, given many funny lines as Joan's down-to-earth maid, and Peter Forbes as Balvenie, an earl who moves from sneaky coward in the first play to monstrous tyrant in the second. A king has no friends," says James II. And one of the themes that emerges strongly from Munro's trilogy, as it does from the history plays of Shakespeare and Schiller, is the inescapable solitude of monarchy and the loneliness of power. That's why, whatever your political views, you nearly always end up feeling a measure of sympathy for a theatrical king. It's also why one of the best scenes in the whole trilogy occurs early on when James I only gets to meet his arranged bride, Joan Beaufort, at their formal wedding ceremony: as played by McArdle and Stephanie Hyam, it's an immensely touching picture of two young people tentatively getting to know both themselves and each other. Does power corrupt this James or is he driven by political necessity? The taunts of a hollow-faced Henry V (James Sives) follow him ghost-like until finally vanquished by a triumphant display of violence. James II: Day of the Innocents

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. In 2006 the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith presented Munro's adaptation of Richard Adams' classic book, Watership Down. James II: Day of the Innocents depicts a violent royal playground from the perspective of the child King and his contemporaries, in a terrifying arena of sharp teeth and long knives.

As Duff observes, this would, in turn, “set the ball in motion” towards the eventual establishment of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. In June 2016 the National Theatre of Scotland and the National Theatre bring their acclaimed trilogy of The James Plays - offering audiences the chance to experience all three plays over one weekend. For example, the character of Peter Morien (played by Thierry Mabonga) is based upon a real figure who “had been in the court for 10 years before the Moorish boat arrived”. The amazing production of the three James plays came to my little town of Adelaide for the 2016 festival, but sadly I was both too time poor (and just poor poor) to see any of the plays. I then got into Linda Porter’s book “Crown of Thistles” which gave a thorough treatment to the James kings, especially the early ones – so I was intrigued to read a modern interpretation of the complex 16th century world and country they ruled. James III of Scotland. A man who's irresistible, charismatic, a man of fashion and culture. A man with big dreams...and no budget to realise any of them.