Skip to main content

Mary: A Gig Theatre Show

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Four stars 

 

If the history books are written by the victors, no-one told the Mary of Rona Johnston’s whistle-stop ride through the life and times of Scotland’s short lived but much dramatised monarch. Here, Mary, Queen of Scots is a folk punk diva reclaiming her story to tell it in her own defiant image over a fifty-minute riot of spoken word monologue and song. As Mary, Johnston is ably abetted by her guitar, drum and fiddle wielding girl gang sisterhood watching her back at every turn as they join in the action. 

 

It begins and ends with blood, as the six-strong ensemble wield their instruments like weapons in Katie Slater’s perfectly poised production for the young Knot Tied Theatre Company. As Johnston takes the microphone on designer Phoebe Wiseman’s regally carpeted stage, Mary’s short life of incident and colour is packed into a fistful of songs that move between rousing hoolies and tender ballads. These are delivered with vocal support from Izzie Atkinson, who also plays future queen Elizabeth, and Jodie Kirkwood, who doubles up as the amorous Lord Darnley. 

 

As for the band of Marys, Hester Irving on fiddle and bass, Laura Coull on drums and bass and Alli von Hirschberg on guitar provide thunderous momentum to blow the dust off infinitely more long winded history books with wit, sass and panache. The bite size brevity of the show is ideal fodder for low attention span audiences in need of their history lessons to come with a kick. 

 

More than this, Johnston, Slater and co have created a call to arms which dispels the dramatic licence that serviced the imagined notion of Elizabeth visiting the condemned Mary in her cell, when in actual fact they never met, divided and isolated by men. As the Marys sing and play their way to the very end, this rip-roaring ride through the past suggests the two women might have been more in tune with each other than we think. 


The Herald, December 23rd 2024

 

Ends 

 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more