‘Terrier-like ferocity’ of grand historical soap opera
James V: Katherine The Studio, Edinburgh Neil Cooper ****
APPEARANCES can be deceptive in the latest episode of Rona Munro’s series of history plays, which, over the last decade since the original James Plays trilogy, has begun to resemble a centuries-spanning zeitgeist-busting soap opera. Take episode five, brought to life in Orla O’loughlin’s chamber sized co-production between Raw Material and Capital Theatres as a series of intimate exchanges highlighting matters of life and death before our heroines take flight en route to personal and political liberation.
The production’s young team of actors line up at the start of the play like some Trainspotting film poster homage, set to a techno soundtrack on Becky Minto’s candle-lined set. In fact, they are acting out some of the fallout of the execution of Protestant reformer Patrick Hamilton at the hands of Scotland’s 16th century religious establishment.
As the play’s subtitle hints at, it is left to Hamilton’s rebelliously inclined sister Katherine to defend his honour. So far, so historically accurate. What follows, however, takes a leap into the speculative, as Katherine spars with king and clergy like an in-yer-face Antigone before her clandestine love affair with her brother’s wife Jenny becomes the play’s emotional heart over its rapid fire 75 minutes.
All this is held up slightly on opening night after an audience member unfortunately takes ill.
As the cast of four bounce back from where they left off with a renewed drive, they relish the rich demotic of Munro’s text. If the piousness of Benjamin Osugo’s Hamilton and terrier-like ferocity of Sean Connor as James are powerful enough, Catriona Faint’s Katherine takes full charge as she squares up to them.
It is Faint’s interplay with an equally dynamic Alyth Ross as Jenny, however, that transcends the cut and thrust of grand gestures for something more human than mere ideology in a thoroughly modern rendering of a play full of love and anger.
Roll on the next exciting episode.