PROMPT CORNER 20/2014:
The James Plays / Electra
Various venues
  Opened September / October, 2014

I was pleasantly surprised by the reviews of Rona Munro’s The James Plays on their transfer to the National Theatre.  Opening as they did mere days after the referendum on Scottish independence yielded a 55% majority in favour of continuing within the United Kingdom, I feared that the plays would have the bejaysus patronised out of them by a complacent-triumphalist Sassenach contingent.  My fears grew as I watched them in one of the National’s all-day sessions (having missed them in Edinburgh, indeed having missed Edinburgh).

It seemed to me that at crucial moments Munro was consciously writing, not rallying cries for the Yes cause in that referendum, but with an awareness of truly renascent Scottish national identity, whether within the United Kingdom or outside it.  I feared it would be all too easy to trample blithely on that voice and that consciousness, and I feared that – at a time when numerous parties in the former Yes camp seemed to be behaving on the basis not simply that the struggle for Scottish independence continues, but that it continues as if nothing had happened – that kind of attitude from London’s cultural as well as its political contingent would not help matters north of the border progress in any constructive direction.

Diplomatic

In the event, whilst a note of gloating and/or condescension is not entirely absent (you can set your watch by Quentin Letts, and set it to the 1950s), the predominant note is a much more participatory kind of enthusiasm.  Dominic Cavendish, who I thought struck an awkward stance a few weeks ago in his review of Rudy’s Rare Records in Birmingham by wondering why Scots would want to secede from this kind of embracing national spirit, here leads the cheers by daring even to use the words “Better than Shakespeare”, albeit followed by a diplomatic question mark.  (I was inevitably reminded of the legendary cry of enthusiasm at the Edinburgh première of John Home’s The Douglas in 1756: “Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?”) 

Michael Arditti takes another tack by noting that Munro has become only the fourth playwright to be staged in trilogy form at the Olivier, although he’s mistaken, overlooking for instance David Hare’s trilogy in the 1990s; he might equally have observed that the number of living women to have had a full-length work presented on that stage is just as tiny.

Vapid

As I write, the more vapid sections of the cultural Internet are alive with shock at the change in Renée Zellweger’s looks, together with outrage that people should feel able to express opinion on the subject so casually.  The fundamental point is valid, and is pre-echoed by Susannah Clapp in her review of Kristin Scott Thomas in Electra: “Only a very sexist culture could be amazed at the fact that she is willing to rough up her hair for a part.”  I was one of the amazed, not simply that Scott Thomas looked un-Scott Thomassy, but that on her first entrance, if I hadn’t already known, I could have believed that it was Kathryn Hunter on the Old Vic stage: somehow she contrived to make herself seem several inches shorter as well as everything else. 
    
Written for Theatre Record.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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