James I (The Key Will Keep The Lock), 8.10.14

The Scots Trilogy (James I, II & III),
currently playing at London's National Theatre

Intriguingly, Hilary Mantel (an unmistakably substantial presence) was in the audience for this NT matinée of the first of Rona Munro’s much-lauded National Theatre of Scotland trilogy on Scots history.  Motley wondered quite what the skilfully nuanced biographer of Thomas Cromwell made of this resolutely demotic foray into the tenebrous gloom and chest-hair of fifteenth century Stirling, a place where even the apples have to be imported from England. 

James McArdle's James I takes on
his uncle Murdac (Gordon Kennedy)

The historical James I (more a “King of Scots” than a “King of Scotland” in Munro’s Nationalist formulation) had come to the throne at the age of twelve in 1406 only to spend eighteen years as a hostage at the English court.  The play covered the 1420-25 period when Henry V of England (Jamie Sives), having publicly humiliated James but realising his own days were numbered, allowed him to return to claim his birthright from the regent, his uncle Murdac Stewart.  Munro’s piece dramatised the thirty year old king’s return, marriage, assumption of powers and humbling of his cousins, the Albany Stewarts.  (For simplicity’s sake, it left out the story of his eventual murder thirteen years later at the hands of yet another of the unruly Stewarts.) 

James McArdle's James I and his bête noire
Blythe Duff's Lady Isabella

With more than a passing nod to Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, but alas with little of the Bard’s lexical sophistication, we witnessed the initially bookish and romantic James (commandingly played by James McArdle) cast aside sensitivity and scruple to assure the safety of his dynasty and that of his new English queen (the endearingly girlish Stephanie Hyam).  Confronted by the greed of the Albany Stewarts (led by Blythe Duff's redoubtable ‘Lady Isabella’, who was clearly channelling Lady Macbeth), the message was that James had no alternative but to “man up”, roger his queen in front of half the Scots nobility and vigorously knock heads together (or off).  This was a bracingly retro message for a female playwright. 

'Uneasy lies the head that wears
the crown' (James McArdle's James I)

Munro had fun depicting the distinctly rambunctious Scottish court, all rough-and-ready snouts to the trough.  Fifteenth-century politics was depicted as being about little more than clashes of uncontrolled appetite between boorish nobles entirely uncivilised by law or culture.  (Lady Isabella, required to vacate the palace upon the king’s return, was only just prevented from carrying off the royal plate, while her unruly sons polished off most of what lunch was available.) 

Jon Bausor’s suitably threadbare two-level set (with a a raised throne above a giant sword, to remind us of the source of all power in this period) was well-done, as were the well-choreographed battle scenes and Paul Leonard-Morgan’s muscular music.  To my mind, though, Munro rather overdid the barely-disguised Nationalist sub-text about the financially-predatory English or the ‘take-me-as-ye-find-me’ Scots being immune to English social deference.

Playwright Rona Munro

Although the relatively obscure historical subject matter was calculated to appeal to Motley, if you’re going to take a period which the Bard so made his own, you really need to clothe your text in something more nourishing than expletives.  While Munro’s timing can’t, in the light of the referendum, be faulted, the exposure to Part One didn’t leave Motley's pulse racing to see Parts Two or Three.