Rona Morison
(Picture: Manuel Harlan)Weird that a play about Scotland’s most famous queen, and about the historic denial or distortion of women’s stories, should largely consist of two men arguing in a room for 90 minutes. Writer Rona Munro approaches Mary Stuart obliquely, through the moral quandaries facing her loyal adviser James Melville, played here with a clenched intensity by Shetland star Douglas Henshall.
It’s a play with big ideas about truth and political expediency, and about what has to be sacrificed in pursuit of an ideal – in this case, the identity, religion and independence of Scotland, where Catholic Mary ruled a newly Protestant people. In practice, it’s a series of grimly repeated disputes about whether Mary was a willing spouse to her third husband Bothwell – strongly suspected of killing her second, Darnley – or a victim of rape.
