Mary Stuart

by Friedrich Schiller (translated by Peter Oswald)

In Performance: 8th-15th December 2007

The history play that Shakespeare should have written writes BILL BRAY

Cate Blanchett is having another stab (metaphorically) at Elizabeth I in the film Elizabeth: the Golden Age, following the earlier film, Elizabeth, made in 1998. Gloriana, the Virgin Queen, continues to interest to us with new dramas and documentaries appearing regularly.

Shakespeare mined the stories of the English throne so that his versions of our kings and queens, along with the wannabees who never made it to the top, have become for many 'the true history of the monarchy'. What he presented in his plays, for example, Richard III is strongly disputed by some historians, who regard the Shakespeare version as a calumny on a king who happened to be on the wrong side of the divide to suit the Tudors. The baby Elizabeth is brought on in Shakespeare's Henry VIII but the real-life dramas of her reign do not appear in his work. To dramatise the current monarch would have been too much.

The seventeenth century became a difficult time in England for dramatists and theatre practitioners, who were persecuted and censored under Cromwell and the Puritans with theatres closed down. After the Restoration Shakespeare's plays were dismissed in favour of the French-influenced drama preferred by of Charles II and his court.

Resourceful acting troupes left England for the more sympathetic stages of the Continent. France had its highly formal theatre with its strict rules for dramatic verse, but Germany not the unified nation of the present, rather a group of separately ruled states was a more fruitful area for English travelling companies to take rough and ready popular plays based on Shakespeare.

In 1800, the same year that Friedrich Schiller wrote Mary Stuart, he produced a very free translation of Shakepeare�s Macbeth, directed by Goethe, at the Weimar Theatre. Ten years before this Schiller, then a medical student, using his knowledge of Shakespeare for his medical dissertation on the interaction of body and mind, took Cassius, Richard III and Lady Macbeth as clinical examples, treating these dramatic figures as fully realised human beings. His first play Die R�uber (The Robbers) was written a year later, while he was still only 22.

It was an age of revolution and political change in Europe which was echoed in the theatre. Schiller became joint manager of the influential Weimar Court Theatre and his plays depended on the Shakespeare influence for structure and the free form that was a reaction against the earlier constraints of neo-classicism.

The rivalry of the two queens, Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth, was obvious dramatic territory and Schiller crafted his drama to include not only moral instruction but also the essentially dramatic conflict between the newly established English Protestant monarch and the Catholic establishment pretender to the throne. His dramatist's imagination and licence is apparent when he stages the argument between Mary and Elizabeth, face to face, an event that never happened in real life. They never, in fact, met.

For our production the translation by Peter Oswald, used for a very successful recent London production, brings 21st century appeal to a 17th century setting.

Two queens in one country makes one too many, writes ANDY BRIGGS, director of Mary Stuart

Scheming, intrigue, plot and counter plot, murder, imprisonment, religious fanaticism, persecution and martyrdom. Any of this echo through time?

Mary Queen of Scots fled to England in 1568. A combination of political factors provoked her departure, including accusations of complicity in the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley.

Although Mary originally asked Elizabeth for aid in regaining her Scottish throne, she was quickly placed under house arrest. Once in England, Mary presented a threat to the childless Elizabeth I since, as her cousin, Mary was the Catholic heir to the English throne as well as being the Scottish Queen. Mary was the focus of numerous conspiracies, and was implicated in an attempt by a young English noble, Babington and his co-conspirators to murder Queen Elizabeth and place Mary on the English throne.

Compressed into three days, Schiller�s play begins in 1587, in Fotheringhay Castle. Mary is attended by her only source of comfort, her nurse, played by Lesley Robbins. Under the watchful eye of Dave Webster, as her jailer, all the back-story her French marriage, her brief and troubled Scottish reign, her long imprisonment in England emerges.

Strong, imposing women, isolated in a world of men: this description applies to both leading characters in Schiller�s play, Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. While one, Mary, played by Vivien Goodwin, is imprisoned by the walls of Fotheringhay castle, Elizabeth, played by Natalie Smith, is imprisoned by her position, unable to act as she might wish for fear of upsetting �her people�. The Queens are the only people who understand each other�s position perfectly, yet they are also each other�s greatest threat.

Vying for love, position and rank around these two monarchs are Paul Wharton's manipulative Lord Burleigh trying to influence Elizabeth at every turn; Richard Tame's ambitious Earl of Leicester, duplicitous in his love for both cousins; Ban Smith, an emotionally charged Mortimer, agreeing to kill for one Queen, while potting to free the other and, as a lone voice of compassion and reason, Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, portrayed by Peter Gray.

Schiller offers a disturbing analysis of the problems that arise whenever political expediency masquerades as justice and judges are subject to the pressures of political force. The outcome is not a happy one for mary, but both women, by the end of the play are examples of how power can destroy and of whom both Queens are "Slaves to their status".