Written by Rona Munro

Directed by Orla O’Loughlin 

Tickets from £27.50

While the bonfire of masculine history chars pages of Scotland’s heritage – it is the stories of women that can burn brightest.

Someone just has to tell them first.

Despite the balancing act of regal storytelling, hidden and repressed queer history, and a hefty dollop of zealotry, Rona Munro’s James V: Katherine is by far the simplest of the James plays – evident with a seventy-five-minute runtime. It’s a production which illuminates and focuses on a romantic puncture through the powers of regalness and religion in a time when their vice grips felt a slip.

Raw Materials and Capital Theatre’s co-production is a scaled departure from the other ambitiously large James plays over the last decade, a welcome diversion, and another pin in the argument for the desperate need for deeper and richer connections between Scotland’s theatres and creatives to come together.

This is a story in which the first billing role is not the crux of the story but rather his second cousin, Katherine, who comes to share her Lutheran brother’s (religious reformer Patrick Hamilton) crime of “heresy”. Benjamin Osugo plays Patrick with an appropriate piousness, even detachment from the world (and what it has become) they are departing in martyrdom – a far cry from Catriona Faint’s more surreptitious and cannier Katherine, who is initially more than a match for King and court. Her brother burned for his preaching, Katherine now becomes embroiled in the mix when she refuses to accept the established faith as she battles with her romantic feelings and sexuality, returning to her long-term friend and lover, Jenny.

Hidden love and the conflict of intolerance and reform (in various shades) beat in the chest of director Orla O’Loughlin’s production. It feels like two separate but ferociously remarkable productions; one a seedy and viciously petulant thread on a toxically masculine welp-King. The other is an intimate, strikingly fierce and roaring exploration of queer history in Scotland with two exceptional lead performers: the more deserving to be told. Together, even with the strengths on and off the stage, there are failures to align. The sequences with Katherine and Jenny’s incarceration in Edinburgh (and their conclusion) and the Ecclesiastical Court, once the titular King makes their presence known, are deserving of more. 

Faint’s central performance, one laced with sharpness and humour, is decidedly at its most capable and impressive when on the attack with Sean Connor’s James V or disarmed and earnest, utilising Janice Parker’s intimately charged movement with Alyth Ross for authentic moments which breath life into the buried queer chapters of history. The pair are captivating together; their energy synergised in an authentic romanticism and physicality. Ross’s impressive debut performance, likely to be remembered for some time, pulsates with gentility as equally as they command with a voice louder and more captivating than any King or noble, channelling everyday love and life above all else.

Sidelined for the most part, Connor catapults when they have the opportunity, becoming their own sounding board, dialled to eleven as the immature King who feels more than ever the weight of expectation and blame thrust onto his brow. With reformation and rebellion waiting for him at every door, this swaggering brute with a salted charm still has this repulsive allure (though this may be Becky Minto’s dazzling costuming) is occasionally let down by the imbalance of language between rhythmic word and obtuse familiarity.

Stylised, James V: Katherine looks fantastic. With a stark minimalism that works well, where Derek Anderson’s lighting does much of the lifting to inject colour and motion against a dark set – a barrier of flickering candles diverging the gate of history with the audience. It blasts away the ash and dust of a period perception with black pleather and velvet to substitute ruff and corset.  

In burning the candle at both ends, the latest instalment of the James series takes a significant departure, for many a welcome one, continuing a thread of the woman of Scottish courts. But it doesn’t quite stretch far enough. As the flames come together, Katherine ignites with intense competence and performance. But until then, the fire lingers too long to the touch, tempting and blistering, with the promise of a more focused story just beyond the smoke. One which condemns the actions of a brattish, brutish monarch, and another that illuminates our history with a sensualness and modern voice for Scotland’s queer past.  

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