The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Past and present collide in energetic James Play
“This production comes to people, the people don’t have to go to the play,” says Orla O’Loughlin, director of James V: Katherine, the fifth instalment of the Scottish historical plays series which playwright Rona Munro began with the James Plays trilogy at Edinburgh International Festival in 2014.
“It’s going to 11 different venues across the country,” she continues. “The company arrives in a van, sets the show up and joins the community for a while, offering a good night out.
“That also feels like an important evolution for what a James Play can be and who it’s for.”
The former artistic director of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, O’Loughlin is now vice-principal and director of drama at Guildhall School in London.
Yet she and her family still live in Edinburgh, and she still directs freelance in Scotland, including the recent award-winning Enough Of Him at Pitlochry Festival Theatre.
She calls the historic story of freed slave Joseph Knight “an extraordinary play, and one that still reverberates”, as it prepares to return this autumn, while a film version is in discussion.
The latest James Play, meanwhile, is a different proposition to the rest of the series.
The original James I, II and III were programmed in the lead-up to the independence referendum of 2014, a big-budget focus on Scottish history produced by Edinburgh International Festival in association with the National Theatres of Scotland and Great Britain.
Featuring The Killing star Sofie Grabol, it was one of Britain’s biggest theatre events of that year.
When Munro – an Aberdonian whose other plays include the Scottish classic Bold Girls – finally presented James IV: Queen Of The Fight in 2022, this time with independent producers Raw Material and Edinburgh’s Capital Theatres in association with the National Theatre of Scotland, it still appeared at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh.
James V, on the other hand, is a compact piece for four young actors. Yet the potency, relevance and historical insight of the words is undimmed.
“The play is about the start of what we now know to be the Scottish Reformation,” says O’Loughlin. “We meet Patrick Spence and his sister Katherine Hamilton, as he’s about to be married to their childhood friend Jenny – a marriage of convenience to enable him to gather a lot of people and preach his philosophy about church reform.
“He’s arrested and refuses to recant what are deemed heretical views against the Catholic Church, and he’s burned at the stake.
“Katherine also refuses to recant and is taken to the king, James V, with whom she has a meeting of