I tried, lord knows I tried, to keep my reviews and recaps of shows brief. But that is, ultimately too difficult. Particularly  when it comes to a show like Mary Stuart. So wave bye-bye to brevity, everyone, and let’s get into it.

Mary Stuart is a long play. LONG. Of the four acts, three of them (and roughly 2 hours) take place before interval. The original play was written in 1800, and has been adapted many times as stage productions, radio plays, and an opera.

Mary Stuart examines the end of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, imprisoned, and eventually executed, by her cousin Elizabeth I. Apart from a fictionalised meeting between them, orchestrated by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, most of the events and timelines in the play are real, if sensationalised for the stage.

In the Almeida Theatre’s production, the parts of Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth are decided each night at the beginning of the performance, literally on the spin of a coin. Just think about that for a second. A coin spins, the camera zooms in, and one woman is raised to glory while the other walks towards her inevitable death. Given the historical context of the play, it feels eerily appropriate.

It also feels eerily appropriate for this day and age at times. In one telling scene in the first act Mary, imprisoned, rails against the irregularities of the trial that has sentenced her to death. Some of her reasons don’t hold water today - she objects to not being tried in front of a council of her ‘peers’ (as a queen, only Elizabeth herself is her peer). But to look at some of the others; evidence not being heard in court, potential false witnesses – these could be objections made about the modern legal system.

And there’s so much more;

Mortimer, a young noble with plans to free Mary from imprisonment by force, thinking his pledge of allegiance and promise of help gives him the right to Mary’s body. 

Elizabeth being physically manhandled and manipulated around the stage by her male advisors.

Elizabeth and Dudley’s rough and tumble, push-pull courtship mirrored in mockery by one of her advisors later, the first trying to convince her to save Mary and the latter trying to convince Elizabeth to kill her. 

The core of the play is the power struggle between the two queens. Mary was younger and famously beautiful, while Elizabeth was notoriously petty and jealous of other women. The two women only meet twice in the play, once during the invented ‘meeting in the woods’ and once in a sort of dream sequence towards the end, when Elizabeth is being roped into her royal regalia for the first time and Mary is being stripped down in preparation for her death.

On the night that I saw it, Juliet Stevenson played Mary and Lia Williams played Elizabeth. Both were fantastic, although I have to say that Lia William’s paranoid, egotistical, desperate Elizabeth edged out as the favourite for me.

Elizabeth, who was called a bastard longer than any of her siblings and was more true a child of Henry than any of them. It was there in her capriciousness, in the faceless phantoms that were the root of all her fears, her childishness and inability to hear anyone praised over her.

At one stage, Elizabeth signs the warrant for Mary’s death, as she was told to do by her advisors, but then gives it to her secretary (played wonderfully throughout by David Jonsson Fray) without any clear order of what to do with it, saying that she knows he will do the right thing. He is, understandably, concerned, fearing that without a clear and direct order, he’ll get blamed for whatever the outcome turns out to be. Which of course comes to pass; when one of the Lords eventually takes it from him and serves it, ordering Mary’s execution, Elizabeth is then able to blame the secretary, saying it was never her intention to execute Mary and that the order was handed over incorrectly. The Lord who served the warrant is dismissed from court. The secretary is sent to the Tower, and his death. I don’t know whether the choice to cast a young black man as the secretary was intentional, but it certainly made yet another powerful statement on the imbalances of power and the feeling of almost inevitability that goes hand in hand with helplessness.

Mary was strident at times, to where I nearly lost my feeling for her - I wondered, like Elizabeth, at the unmatchable beauty and wit that she was said to possess. But when she pulled back, when the shrieks gave way to pleas, I understood the shrieks all the more. The urgency, the lack of agency, the educated woman backed into a corner, into a death sentence she saw coming and could still do nothing to escape. 

The young man playing Mortimer was unfortunately the weak point of the play for me. He never really moved beyond juvenile, somewhat whiny, and put me in mind of every annoying, entitled young man who ever tried to mansplain my own world to me. Which may have been his intention, in which case, bravo! But he did come across as a slightly two dimensional character.

I had a brief moment at the very beginning of the play where I was positive that I knew one of the actors from something. To the point where I had to stop and check (thank you, Google!), and then text my friend in excitement at interval. Robert Dudley was played by John Light, who is in the North and Southminiseries that Steph and I watch religiously every few years. He, and the cast on the whole, were fantastic, but the two leading ladies did very much steal the show, so bravura to them. 

Mary Stuart begs the question - why would anyone ever choose to rule? And yet, the two women at the centre of the play, do. One maybe more reluctantly than the other, although for all her claiming that she wants to be free of it, Elizabeth does nothing but cling to the throne with her fingertips if needs be. 

The show must be exhausting. Mary’s role appears the more challenging at first glance, but her motivations at least stay true throughout the story. Elizabeth vacillates, something she was famous for doing in life, to the utter despair of her advisors. On stage she is constantly wringing her hands, striding around, picking imaginary lint off the clothes of her advisors. She clearly sees herself as young and desirable, and is terrified of being confronted by a younger, more beautiful Mary. In reality, her jealousy destroyed more than just her Stuart cousin - her Grey cousins, the sisters of Lady Jane Grey, were similarly hated for their youth and beauty. So too were Catherine Carey, the daughter of Mary Boleyn and (possibly) King Henry, making her Elizabeth’s cousin and potential half-sister, and Catherine’s daughter Lettice. Elizabeth was a woman not so much scared of her mortality, but of having the proof of it presented in front of her.

The final scene of the play is haunting – Mary, stripped down to her shift, her eyes fixed on heaven, a martyr in the making, and Elizabeth, laced into a gown in which she can barely move, her face smeared with thick, white paint. Mary is the one going to her death, but it is Elizabeth who ends the play abandoned, alone in the middle of the stage, trapped, like a pale corpse in a golden dress.