Robert Icke's Mary Stuart

spoilers.

As someone who had their life changed by Robert Icke’s Oresteia, didn’t see Robert Icke’s Uncle Vanya, but did see Robert Icke’s Mr Burns way back in 2014, I’ve come to the conclusion that Robert Icke is fucking unpredictable.

Unlike directors he vocally admires, like Ivo van Hove and Katie Mitchell, Icke doesn’t really have *an aesthetic*. In a Katie Mitchell production, you can expect either a) run-down 19^th century house or b) weird mash up of set and film production site. For Ivo van Hove a) some cold, sterile office-space or b) anything else that’s cold and fucking sterile, because fuck yeah existential capitalism!

But then what in the shit does Robert Icke have? Oresteia was all cold marble and glass, Vanya sofas and wooden frames.

If you’d have asked me what Robert Icke’s Mary Stuart would look like before I saw it I could have told you and would have been very wrong: probably an empty, desolate stage. Minimal props, simple costumes (business suits ((why are we still so obsessed with business suits in modern dress productions???))) and cheeky flashes of modern music – think God Only Knows. Instead Icke opts for something a bit more different. The characters are in modern dress. Think when the RSC try and do modern dress – it’s actors hurriedly walking through the set looking serious as if they’ve got important business suit shit to do. The set’s *almost* in the round, and backed by high brick walls. It looks a bit naff. I couldn’t tell if the brick walls were real or fake so they may as well be fake. I’d rather have had the actual brick walls of the Almeida used as they were in Oil or Bakkhai. At the very end a bit of the wall drops down to reveal some Tutor symbol or shit. I didn’t really know what the symbol was so the impact was wholly lost. It was like a sun and looked entirely out of place with the rest of the production. I thought it was the symbol of the Plantagenet’s but google seems to disagree.

Mary Stuart does that brilliant thing of having the cast enter just before the show properly starts, re: Oresteia. They enter, look around, waiting. They look at us, too. There’s a low bass rumble, because something significant is happening. The Queens are missing. And then they enter. Leicester (John Light, whose voice is near Angus Wright levels of perfection but not quite) steps forward, looks at the both of them. We notice that a birds eye view of the stage is being relayed to screens around the auditorium. Light places a coin in a little golden bowl resting on a bench at the front of the stage. He spins it. The coin spins. There’s that low bass rumble (re: Orestia) as the coin spins and spins.

As someone who tends to remain unemotionally involved in performances, even I have to admit to being tense during this sequence. Everything just works. The cast have actual stakes in the spin – it decides who will be playing Elizabeth and who Mary for the performance. They’re tense, and it shows. And then the coin lands. At my performance Lia Williams was Mary and Juliet Stevenson plays Elizabeth. The two acknowledge each other.  Then the whole cast turn to Stevenson and do this funny over-exaggerated bow / curtsy thing. Imagine stretching your arms out to embrace a descending angel and you’re near. Mary exits and Elizabeth kneels to sign the warrant of Mary’s arrest. At least I think so, anyway. The camera filming it went a bit funny so we only saw the bottom of the piece of paper and Elizabeth signing it. But her doing the signature is too forced and memorised to be believable, and so the whole thing suddenly loses impact because all of a sudden you remember that she’s an actress copying down a learnt image.

That opening is probably the perfect summary of my entire feelings towards the Almeida Theatre’s Mary Stuart. I wanted to love it, properly wanted to, but there was just a *something* stopping me embracing it in the same way I did Icke’s Oresteia or Katie Mitchell’s Cleansed or Sleepwalk Collective’s Domestica. I watched the thing, and I admired the thing on a visual / aesthetic level but I was never really moved by it until the final act (which is, admittedly, fucking incredible – worth the ticket price alone imo.)

The introduction ends, the stage rotates, as it does at the very end of every scene – if the Oliviers did an award for most pointless revolving stage this would certainly be a contender – and straight away we’re into the first act of Icke’s adaptation. Now I say translation, as do the posters, but I’d really wonder how far this is an “adaptation” as opposed to just a “translation”. Sure, Icke’s condensed the action down into one day (and a little bit – it’s a 26 hour period) but it’s hardly like Schiller’s original is a critique of Galilean science. If Oresteia and Vanya were remixes, then Mary Stuart is Icke revelling in the originals. And I have to say I was a little bit disappointed by the text or whatever we’re going to call it. It just seemed very, well, safe. Remember in Icke’s other adaptations when the characters would start throwing around swear words and you’d realise how exciting it was watching Klytemnestra talk about getting fucked hard? Yeah, not so much here.

The first scene ends and the second ends. Fuck me it’s boring. And long. The text is, in essence, five very long conversations, and Mary Stuart’s conversations are more interesting than Elizabeth’s. With the exception of the third act when the two queens meet and the final act, the playwright in me just wanted to get the Word document of the text and go to town on it. And that rotating stage. Why? It must’ve cost so much. The only time I felt it really added anything was at the end when it rotated continuously, and even that’s in a cheesy “history is like a big wheel spinning the fuck around” visual analogy.

It’s also interesting to notice “the verse”, that dreaded term. If I hadn’t have bought the script before and leafed through it, I would not have known this translation was in verse. It’s spoken really fast. They plough through the lines. No pauses, no stops. It’s relentless, and suits the play brilliantly. This is a play about powerful people being rushed to make decisions under a lot of pressure, and it really fits it. While I hope the same approach isn’t taken to Hamlet, you have to hand it to Icke for doing a translation with the actual intention of being spoken really quickly and telling us this in the playtext notes.

But it’s testament to the actors that they deliver the lines so quickly and, at least from my experience, nothing was lost. As I remember one line was fluffed but I don’t remember when or by who, so it probably didn’t.

Lia Williams and Juliet Stevenson are both brilliant. I'll be interested to see if Stevenson's Gertrude has shades of her Elizabeth. I saw Lia as Mary, and I'd be interested to see the other rotation because I cannot imagine it being the other way round. Lia Williams is also great at screaming. There's the bit at the start of act three where she just screeches, re: Oresteia.

And Rudi Dharmalingam . Rudi Fucking Dharmalingam. He’s class. And scary, properly creepy. I’d be interested to know if he saw Cleansed, because there were definite flashes of Tinker with his weird, not-quite-in-the-room delivery. It’s not his voice. It’s odd. It’s as if he’s an octave higher than he actually is. His voice floats, and I’m getting bogged down in metaphor here but his voice.

John Light’s great too. There’s a bit where he and Burleigh (Vincent Franklin) and trying to get Elizabeth to sign the warrant confirming Mary’s execution. Other people are physically holding them back, and there’s bodies moving around each other, they’re like dancers. They swirl around each other and twist and spin, and the two men pass the pen (as lethal as any sword) between them trying to get her to sign it. I was reminded of Ivo van Hove, and the way he positions bodies on stage to say more about the characters and their relationships than any lighting / costume / sound could. You get that here, to brilliant effect. It’s just a shame that the movement in the rest of the production doesn’t follow the same line of development.

And then there’s the music. Not quite invisible enough to be a statement, but not quite great enough to be impressive. A friend I saw it with described it brilliantly: “Just a low rumble with a BOOOOONG every couple of minutes”. There’s ticking clocks too, the backdrop to a lot of the performance. Tick tick tick. A bit of a cheap way to show that time’s passing and thus running out, but effective if a bit annoyingly loud from where I was sat in the circle.

Although fair play to Laura Marling. She did the music for As You Like It at the RSC a few years back and it was class. While this is only one song, it’s beautiful. Mary’s going to her death, meanwhile Elizabeth gets decked out in all the costume we expect Elizabeth I to have: massive dress, white painted face, wig. The song (I don’t remember the lyrics exactly but I’m praying they release it) is all about the grief of the life you’ve led, the chances you’ve wasted. And you realise in a way that both women are going to death. Yes, Mary gets the bad end of the stick, but Elizabeth’s signed away everything. She’s shown her court that she can be walked all over, killed her cousin and abandoned her morals. In turning to execution she’s become her father. It’s beautiful. At one point they both stop and look at each other. Elizabeth’s so decked out she can barely walk, and Mary’s nearly naked, shivering in a thin white nightie. And they lock eyes and the stage rotates so you can see both their faces, and you realise that it could have been so much differently, and for a minute I was quite profoundly emotional. And then Mary turns and exits quietly. She gets to leave the stage, and Elizabeth gets left alone. She stands on stage in silence, alone, for a good thirty seconds. And it’s the perfect image. She’s lost everything.

Reading this it sounds like I remained pretty much passive to Mary Stuart. I wasn’t. I felt a lot, sometimes boredom, sometimes sheer emotion at the beauty of the choreography of the bodies on the stage. Please don’t think I disliked it because I didn’t. I just wasn’t really moved in the way I was expecting to be, which I’m sure says just as much about me as it does about the production.

An interesting one. Happy I saw it, but not sure I’d sit through it again out of choice. You can’t say Robert Icke likes to repeat himself, though.