Mary Stuart

Freely adapted with finesse by Kate Mulvaney from a centuries-old playscript by Friedrich Schiller, this version of Mary Stuart inventively and shrewdly explores the fatal relationship and negotiations behind the scenes between two cousins who had never met: the Virgin Queen, Queen Elizabeth I; and her cousin Mary, the queen of Scotland who has abdicated and fled Scotland for the help of her cousin, only to find herself imprisoned: at the play’s beginning, so far for nineteen long years.

What Chaika Theatre did with this clever play was near perfect.  Acting all round was superb.  The expressive interplay between Steph Roberts’s Mary Stuart and Cameron Thomas’s Paulet, Mary’s gaoler, showed clearly both Paulet’s humanity, even toward a woman officially his queen’s enemy, and Mary’s appreciativeness of it even in her despair.  The far more adverse interactions of Elizabeth’s chief advisor, Lord Burleigh (Richard Manning), with both Elizabeth’s much younger lover, the Earl of Leicester (Jarrad West), and her gentler advisor and Keeper of the Royal Seal, the Earl of Shrewsbury (Neil McLeod), well evoked the respective qualities of all three.  As the timid secretary Davison, Lachlan Herring surprised us with an impassioned agony of failure, and Steph Roberts made the private agony and less private disdain of Mary Stuart her own.  And giving the play supreme memorability was the most captivating performance as Queen Elizabeth by Karen Vickery as Elizabeth was successively torn one way and another on the fate of her cousin queen as various events were presented to influence her.  It was a riveting performance throughout.

The production’s minimal in-the-rectangular set design, taking the shape of the much disputed Christian cross, made the emotion all the more immediate by allowing seating of the entire audience near to the stage.  Costumes had the effect of suggesting the period though they incorporated at least elements of the present day, and sound effects were all-too-realistic.

Leaving aside its needing a little maintenance to a couple of the costumes, greater restraint on audio volume at the start of the second act, and some variation to the soundtrack that droned through interval, Chaika made of Mary Stuart a couple of hours or so that kept us on the edge of our seats though we all knew what was coming.  Engaging the senses and stirring strong emotions with fine acting under careful direction, Chaika’s production is not to be missed.

John P. Harvey

Image:  Karen Vickery, as Queen Elizabeth I, and Steph Roberts, as Mary Queen of Scots, in Mary Stuart.  Photographer: Jane Duong.