Sophie Laplane, Scottish Ballet’s resident choreographer, aimed to bust gender archetypes in her surreal retelling of the Mary, Queen of Scots saga. But this series of set pieces – some dazzling, some scattershot – largely succumbs to Scotland’s enduring national myth of a brilliant, brave figure crushed by a more forceful apparatus of power.
That apparatus belonged to Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth I. Her faltering memories as a dying woman – two decades after she bowed to pressure, ordering Mary's execution – scaffold the narrative Laplane crafted with collaborator James Bonas, that leaned into the queens’ affinities as ruthless performers of monarchy, navigating violently patriarchal societies.
Mary and Elizabeth corresponded but never met. Laplane imagined the dying Elizabeth's regrets as a striking duet between two proxy characters who conjured a sisterly intimacy to scraping cello and growling strings – pointing eloquently to what might have been, had the two found trust instead of plotting mutual destruction.
In an inspired gender-queer casting move, Elizabeth was played by the statuesque Harvey Littlefield – in fiery red wig, corset, doublet and slashed knee-breeches – towering over the magnetic Roseanna Leney as Mary and the spry, mischievous Charlotta Öfverholm as the Older Elizabeth. Their costuming, however, lacked the wit of Littlefield’s: Leney in an unremarkable black cocktail dress; Öfverholm in an ill-fitting diaper and bald wig. Öfverholm is a fine enough actress to transcend the mockery of old age but a Jester figure compounded it, her job description extending to elder care: scrubbing Elizabeth's armpits in the bath for cheap laughs.
Littlefield briefly donned stilts to signify Elizabeth's dominance at court. Ballet's own instrument of torture, the pointe shoe, might have been more on brand. Off-stilts, Littlefield furled and unfurled sculpted limbs with pantherine grace, darting suspicious glances over one shoulder or gazing fretfully at Thomas Edwards, splendidly sinister as spymaster Francis Walsingham, who plied Elizabeth with intelligence on her enemies. Walsingham rustled his frock coat to summon his operatives in bug-like helmets who sprung nervily into action like the patricians in Paul Taylor's Cloven Kingdom, acting out primal instincts.
Laplane has a gift for choreographing interior conflict and conspiracy in a taut vocabulary of snaking torsos, thrusting legs and semaphoring arms, delivered by a strong cast of actor-dancers.
She also handles passion with unusual frankness. Mary falls for her gigolo secretary Rizzio, then her second husband, the brutish Lord Darnley, with a homosexual affair between the two men complicating the triangle. Laplane was on thin ice historically, but traced the evolution of desire with bracing clarity. An exultant Leney, a marvelously sleazy Bruno Micchiardi as Rizzio and a dashing Nicol Edmonds as Darnley straddled the line between revulsion and fascination – Leney jamming her fingers into Edmonds’ mouth, dragging him around the stage. Lust turns to sadism in Act 2, after Darnley orchestrates Rizzio's murder in front of a pregnant Mary. She gets her revenge, deploying female courtiers to conjure the silhouette of a giant man-eating spider on the backdrop.
Darnley's assassination-by-arachnid is staged alongside Mary's labour. The Jester rips a Velcroed baby bump from Mary, handing her a balloon scrawled with ‘James’. Old Elizabeth sneaks a balloon for herself, mimics Mary’s cradling then breaks into a honky-tonk lasso dance with her balloon, until the Jester punctures it with a needle. Meanwhile, Darnley dies an agonizing death as the spider-maidens drag him offstage: birth and death magnificently coupled – worthy of Martha Graham, but with a devastating comic edge.
Despite these flashes of brilliance, the ballet reduces a complex geopolitical struggle to a psychological clash between two women, with sex as the engine of Mary’s destruction. The larger context of religious strife, rebellions, foreign alliances and succession dramas could have been hinted at, if only through set design. Instead, blank walls lifted and lowered with distracting frequency, occasionally projecting ciphers and graffiti branding Mary a murderer and a whore – no substitute for a sense of the queens’ political machinations.
An early scene between a teenaged Mary and her mother-in-law Catherine de’ Medici (a marvelous Madeline Squire) promised more. Catherine glided across the stage in an enormous metal pannier on wheels – a gilded cage – trailed by a chain of courtiers, before coldly dispatching Mary back to Scotland after her young husband’s brief reign as King of France: an early lesson in political survival.
Disappointed thereafter in the flotilla of flatpack wardrobes wheeled on and off by the dancers, serving mostly as portals to… the wings! Like the plywood partitions on casters Soutra Gilmour designed for Helen Pickett's Crime and Punishment at American Ballet Theatre, they looked tacky, and turned dancers into stagehands. Laplane’s flights of fancy deserved a more elegant runway – somewhere between Zeffirelli's opulent horror vacui and Gilmour’s particleboard aesthetic lies a modern set that conveys both the pomp and claustrophobia of the courts, and the flickering landscape of Elizabeth's remorse.
