In the Sunday Times in an interview with Kate Maltby, Rona Munro makes the interesting point about “her pet hate” the dramatic, historical heroines of theatre, “You see a story about a woman in history, and they show her as being more feisty, more determined and more smart talking than any man. In that cultural context, in that period, if she’d been prancing around talking like that, she’d have died. They’d have killed her.”  

Certainly we can acknowledge that the English queen,  Elizabeth I was more skilled politically than Mary, by keeping many suitors in the hope that she might marry them, or maybe she had better advisors. 

Munro’s play is debate rather than action and her lead Henshall has that steadfast integrity and loyalty called for but he is a solid actor rather than a mercurial one.  As Melville who had known Princess Mary since their childhood in France, his approach is commendable.  He calls her “a motherless bairn” as her mother ruled Scotland as regent on her daughter’s behalf while Mary was in France.  Melville is the only real life character of the three.  His words are the basis of the drama. 

Thompson seems the most politically astute of the three, not a personality trait I admire and not helped by the costume choice of a grey collarless linen Mao type jacket.  As Agnes, Rona Morison is a zealot, with that extreme Protestant vigour seen in Scotland today in the Wee Free and the Exclusive Brethren Churches.  

We wonder with modern minds how much Mary would have benefitted from the spin of a Public Relations advisor.  Mary (Meg Watson) has two brief walk on parts and I supposed I wanted to see more of her and even Bothwell in the play, so I could make up my mind about her alleged sexual dalliances.  In history, Mary tried to keep Bothwell out of prison but she also applied to the Pope twice for an annulment of that marriage.   

The focus of the Second Act is John Thompson, rapidly promoted for supplying information to Bothwell, now given the task of getting Melville to sign the abdication of Mary document. 

Whatever the outcome of Munro’s play, my lasting image of Mary is with her head cut off in Fotheringhay, twenty years after this play is set and after twenty years of imprisonment, her little dog hiding in her skirts.