*** (3 stars)
“hideously truthful”
To be fair, the rest of the audience would probably have given this show four stars: there was a lot of laughter throughout the performance, and loud applause at its end. My difficulties arose both from the fact that the humour didn’t really chime with mine, and that I’d only just come out of a concert by counter-tenor Iestyn Davies with the Jupiter Ensemble which touched me deeply and from whose magic I’d not fully emerged by the time I sat down in the Netherbow Theatre of the Scottish Storytelling Centre to hear about Me, Myself & Mary (Queen of Scots)
Unsurprisingly, the theatre was virtually full – in Edinburgh, in August, Mary Queen of Scots is bound to be a big draw for tourists, for admirers of the late queen, and for those who feel they’d like to know more about her tragic life.
Marjolein Robertson, appearing as Mary Fraser, bounces on stage and announces how close she feels to the Queen and much she has in common with her: they both had older sisters, Elizabeth… Hang on – that’s not true: yes, Mary was the younger, but the two queens were cousins…and so the story unfolds, but possibly not as you’ve ever heard it before. It’s a curious mixture of historical fact, biased opinion, and plain untruths, told in a comical style and interspersed with illustrations of the relationship between narrator Mary and her older sister Elizabeth.
Those moments are hideously truthful to anyone who has had a challenging relationship with a sibling – brilliantly observed and superbly acted. What didn’t work for me was the comic style of the historical ‘narrative’ – simply because it didn’t chime with my sense of humour. It obviously worked for almost everyone else present. There were a couple of really uncomfortable moments for me – when Mary portrayed her sister as some sort of mummy or ghoul [promptly declaring that this was perhaps rather OTT], and in her depiction of Queen Mary’s second husband, Lord Darnley’s reported ‘deformity’. I didn’t find this funny – but some people did.
Certainly some of narrator Mary’s misunderstandings of Queen Mary’s history could be amusingly memorable – her French husband was a dolphin, Bothwell was a Border Retriever – and there was some humourous use of the portrait frame hanging centre stage to enable Mary to have conversations with other people. Actor Marjolein’s ability to change character and accent in a nanosecond was excellent. However, I did find that the juxtaposition of fairly broad humour around the death of Mary and others around her with the serious ending to the present-day story of sibling rivalry didn’t sit comfortably with me. It was brilliantly acted, but would have been better served by its own show: as would the historical Mary’s story, however it had been portrayed.
As I say, the rest of the audience felt the show was extremely funny and very well done. Come and see it, and make up your own mind!
Me, Myself and Mary (Queen of Scots), Storytelling Centre (Venue 30), For Info go to: Me, Myself and Mary (Queen of Scots) | Theatre | Edinburgh Festival Fringe (edfringe.com)
ScotsGay Arts 