“Renaissance meets Punk!” was one of the headlines for this much-anticipated world premiere from Scotland’s national ballet company, and for once it was right.
Sophie Laplane, star dancer with the company for 13 years before spreading her choreographic wings and giving free rein to her innate theatricality, is now the company’s resident choreographer. She is also in demand internationally, and perhaps it’s her Franco-British heritage that made her absolutely the right person (in collaboration with James Bonas) to take on Scotland’s most tragic and divisive historical figure.
An aged and grotesque Queen Elizabeth dances alone. On her dying day she recalls her memories of the relationship with her cousin Mary. We’re seeing it all through her eyes. But this isn’t just a trek through history, it’s a tale about power, about reputation and, crucially, about women and their place in the world.
The bones of the story are well known, although Laplane has taken a few liberties, and it might help to brush up your history before going, because once it starts, this production moves at speed. Married off to the French Dauphin, Mary is sent home to Scotland on his early death and is almost immediately involved in complex plots to prevent her pursuing a claim to the English throne. Complex plotting, spying and murder ensue – plus, here, some serious sexual entanglement – before Elizabeth puts an end to it all by ordering Mary’s execution. After the death of both queens, Mary’s son James eventually inherits both thrones. In his play Mary Stuart Schiller famously imagined a meeting between the two most powerful women in the Tudor period – who, so far as history knows, never actually met. They don’t meet here, either, but frequently share the stage in hauntingly apparition-like might-have-been moments.
From her first appearance on stage, it’s clear that Mary (Roseanna Leney) is Elizabeth’s polar opposite: elegant in black, shiny dark hair in a bob, she is one foxy lady and she is certainly going to be Trouble. In Act 1, teasing and entrancing, she engages choreographically with every man she meets. With the virginal Dauphin, she is sweet and skittish; arriving in the Scottish court, she has tauntingly come-on encounters with Rizzio (here an ‘adviser’ not a musician) and with her future husband Lord Darnley, sent by Elizabeth to muddy the waters. Mary is rarely still, her choreography all for steely legs, pointy feet. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is in white and stalks the stage regally alone. Her first entrance (as a young queen) is on stilts, prowling mysteriously around the stage while courtiers creep about on their knees. She is also played by a man (Harvey Littlefield).
Gender fluidity is rife in the production. The corps of courtiers in various realms appear in unisex costume, the Scots in all-purpose frocks/kilts. Mary’s companions – the famous ‘Four Marys’ – although danced by women, are themselves slim and sexless in black. Walsingham, Elizabeth’s notorious spymaster, played with relish by Thomas Edwards, is a threatening figure in black throughout, his spies beetle-like creatures who scuttle around, creeping from the wings at crucial moments to report on events. And what of the green-clad jester figure (a sprightly and witty Kayla-Maree Tarantolo), who flits in and out, supplying some of the genuinely comic moments? She it is who solemnly writes “James” on the white balloon to which Mary has just given birth. Puck, Ariel and a stray from Cinderella all at once, she/he/they are a delight.
Both Rizzio (Javier Andreu) and Darnley (Evan Loudon), however, strut their manly stuff brilliantly in rousing pas de deux with Mary. But here Laplane has given fact to another historical teaser by suggesting a gay affair. Their encounter is a brutal one, struggling to a breathtaking acceptance. Sex and violence are inseparable in this production, and always close cousins of betrayal: Rizzio’s violent murder ends Act 1 and sets in train Mary’s flight to England and her inevitable downfall. In Act 2, she is caught in Elizabeth’s net – literally, as a cage descends to enclose her – and scribbled graffiti start to appear on the walls screaming “Catholic Witch” and “Whore”. Oh, the whirligig of time… In a final visual coup, Mary walks to her execution in a blood-red bikini… Wow!
Laplane clearly has a million ideas a minute and she’s thrown most of them into the mix. While her choreography is both classically sound and adventurous, I’d take issue with some of the minor theatrical choices. While the entrance of the young Elizabeth on stilts is a visual coup de théâtre, other points are a bit metaphor-heavy. The costuming of the English courtiers as helmeted Greek heroes is clever but odd, and I’m still not sure why their French counterparts all had huge stomachs protruding from their doublets (apparently they were rich enough to eat a lot, but…). And what about the dog?
You have to have your wits about you for this production and I’m already dying to see it again. Complex, riveting, baffling at times but never less than stunning, it’s a great addition to the company’s repertoire.
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