Dazzling drama at Eden Court from James IV – a showman king and two hijacked black lassies

REVIEW: James IV

Eden Court, Inverness

5 stars

THE death of the Queen and learning to call Charles King in our real lives makes the concerns of Rona Munro’s James IV seem even more current than her miraculously modern-seeming 15th century Scottish royals do.

Succession – giving birth to and grooming an heir - uniting a nation, creating a heroic public image that guarantees good PR across Europe and the rest of the world, James IV perhaps has more in common with the Windsors than history might suggest.

And the now grown-up James who shines his way through this play is as much a showman as a warrior king, a pragmatist and still penitent for the death of his father, in the latest episode of The James Plays.

We last saw him as a 14-year-old, uncertain and standing over his father’s body on the battlefield at the end of James III.

“Don’t worry about what kind of king you’re going to be. Scotland herself doesn’t know what kind of nation she is half the time … Time to walk out in the world and find out,” James is told by his great aunt as that play ended.

Here, we first meet the witty, generous-spirited, dutiful adult king he seems to have become on walkabout with his English wife Margaret among his subjects at Holyrood in Edinburgh when he comes across the “Moorish” women, Ellen and Anne, who will join his cultured court – and give the play its heart.

Seized by pirates on their way from Spain to a new life at the English court, the two have ended up in Scotland. As James grins: “Well, they were diverted shall we say!”

Through James’s series of tournaments with entertainments and the best in the world fighting to be champion, this play has comedy and the full-on action of hand-to hand combat, dancing, music and songs and a clever play within a play.

And through it all, events test James in front of our eyes and follow the ups and downs of the bond between Anne, who becomes an attendant to Margaret, James’s queen, and Ellen, left to find a new role as an entertainer – eventually the tournaments’ Queen Of The Fight.

Words and poetry power this drama, the real-life poet or “makar” William Dunbar portrayed as a tragi-comic figure who struggles to make a living, despite having a way with words that makes him a natural choice for “flyting” or using poetry to mock, disparage and hurt different characters, most importantly Ellen in an act of revenge by Queen Margaret with racist taunts in the poem Ane Black Moor, a real poem by Dunbar that started Rona Munro on this play as it brought her a changed view of the actual diversity of Scottish life at that time.

Poetry is also a powerful weapon in one of the funniest moments in the drama, when Dunbar helps James get his revenge on courtier Archibald Douglas, James jealous that Queen Margaret fancies and dances with Douglas. And in this ‘flyting’ – a bit like a one-sided modern battle rap – Dunbar also imitates Douglas’s dancing “Like a stirk staggering in the rye/His a*** gave mony a hideous cry”.

“All the world is words,” Dunbar tells Ellen early in the play, when he teaches her Scots words in a torrent going back and forth between teacher and the newcomer who drinks in the knowledge and speaks it back to Dunbar in his exact intonation, making the audience laugh as she instantly sounds like a native Scot herself.

This Scotland of James IV has much we should envy, as once more Scots are likely to face the test of imagining the nation they want for the future – and the racism Ellen encounters – still too much a part our present today - should surely be no part of that.

“Scotland, you’re the joke!” Ellen accuses after the attack. In an era when this medieval Scotland is a multi-lingual exchange of ideas with other nations, Dunbar has a go at the vision of Scots others will take away from the tournaments: “That’s a national character we can all be proud of eh? … Let’s get batsh*t drunk and nut each other into oblivion”.

“Hame is any place you and I are together,” Ellen reminds Anne at a difficult point in their history. And they make Scotland their home, their untold story a revelation into the real Scotland of our past, sometimes painfully like ours.

Rona Munro’s dazzling drama has great ensemble performances – including new Scots Ellen and Anne (Danielle Jam and Laura Lovemore), steely manipulator Phemy (Blythe Duff), Daniel Cahill as the mercurial renaissance king, and not least and particularly resonant for a Highland audience, Malcolm Cumming portraying the touching bravado and pathos of the youthful Donald, heir of the Lordship of the Isles, a victim of James’s need for control. MC

A Raw Material and Capital Theatres production in association with National Theatre of Scotland. James IV: Queen Of The Fight is on at Eden Court until Saturday night. Tickets and info: https://eden-court.co.uk/event/james-iv-queen-of-the-fight