Mary - Hampstead Theatre

Loved this today…interesting play, great production and great acting. Had to sort of sit down for a bit at the end to recover! Front row seats were perfect! The sort of play where you wander out after the matinee and you feel like you have been transported to another world! Rona Munro is a very clever writer.

Actually quite short, I went last night and I was out at 9.10, it's about 1 hour and a half without an interval.
I thought the writing very good and the acting excellent, loved Douglas Henshall in particular. I didn't feel completely engrossed in the events, that is probably because I don't know anything about the history. For this reason, I was a bit bored for the first 45 minutes or so. Got more into it later on, and the final bit is powerful. Definitely worth seeing but do read the programme before seeing.

Thank you alessia; sounds as though I could risk an evening performance, then. Like Latecomer, I never buy programmes (except Downstairs at Hampstead, where they're included with your ticket cost) so would hope never to need to do so in order to follow any production. I don't recall being that impressed or engaged by the writer's James trilogy at the NT but a single, shorter play sounds less challenging.

I used to collect flyers, that all got pinned up on two huge cork boards, or failing that I’d put up the paper ticket if I liked the play enough and had no flyer….I am now a bit stuck, as neither seems to exist any more in theatres! BRING BACK FLYERS please….of course the “save the planet” part of me does approve of the change!  

We have a thread about James IV here:

theatreboard.co.uk/thread/9725/james-iv-queen-fight

Welcome to the Board, petrichor. Please post a review afterwards.

Disappointing reviews for this: 2 stars from the Standard, WOS, Telegraph; 3 stars from Time Out, Guardian, TheatreCat. I think only Reviews Hub gave it 4.

I'm still looking forward to seeing it as I've liked Rona Munro's other plays and it's good to see some positive comments on here. Hampstead is long overdue a really good main house production - too many substandard new plays and oddly chosen revivals.

Hampstead lost their literary manager quite abruptly, I’m not sure if they’ve hired a new one yet.

Edit - looks like they’ve combined the literary department and participation department into one role.

I think this really sums up a lot about the play. I liked the staging, I thought the cast were great (intense and claustrophobic) but without a knowledge of the history - I felt lost at more than one point. I'd have rather a free sheet with a brief history or something to give me a basis. Hell, I'd have taken a scene setting piece of exposition at the start. A shame as otherwise I think this would be so much better. Three stars from us with the notable effort from the cast helping with that.

Oh yes in terms of Mary and what happened or didn't happen to her for sure, but there was a lot of scene setting missing. So many references to her being Catholic and it being an issue, I've no context for that. The relationship with the English queen mentioned, again no context for that. Entirely agree about the confusion and to make up your own mind on events depicted but the background to those I felt very missing.

Felt mostly good about this tonight, although as a Scotsman of a certain age I learned about Mary and Darnley and Bothwell and Rizzio at school, and that education runs deep... So i thought this was an interesting play, did require focus which is a bit unusual for a lot of today's theatre, but I felt it really repaid the effort. As cavocado says there was a lot going on and interestingly I came out of the show with a rather different perspective on what the play was "about" and what it said about Mary than my husband (who is Welsh but English-educated). None of the characters are simple, it is impossible to properly determine their motivations.

Rather disappointing Q&A afterwards, don't know who was hosting, someone from the theatre but from halfway up the stalls I couldn't hear what he was saying when he introduced himself or when he embarked on a long anecdote about someone who had been significant to the Hampstead Theatre who died recently. Unusually the host had no questions themselves and opened it up to the audience at the start which made things rather stilted. Douglas Henshall didn't participate and Rona Munro wasn't there and while the young actors did their best they were not able to well articulate some of the themes of the play. Interestingly Rona Munro's first draft did not have Mary appearing at all in the play but I was amused at the conversation that an agent would have had about


Asked about why 'Mary' was appearing at Hampstead, out of sequence, the host said that Hampstead had commissioned Rona Munro to write something for them in 2011, and paid for her to go to a writing retreat, but it had not arrived, so she offered this to them as compensation.

I've been thinking about this play a lot since seeing it last Saturday and mulling over what I thought. I'm very much a fan of the James Plays (drove to Edinburgh from the East of England to see James IV!), and adored the original trilogy. For me, 'Mary' is a 3 star play. It had lots of lovely nods to the other plays (one in particular - it wasn't quite 'the key will keep the lock' but just a stone's throw from it), and I liked the exploration of the extent to which opinions and hearsay shape history (especially for those who don't have a voice to contribute to it), but for me there was not enough depth/ shade in it. I didn't feel any particular moments of high drama, perhaps until the very final moments. It was very dense. For me, the concentration it took to follow did not match the pay off.

Still keeping all things crossed for James V (she mentions this will be produced in 2023 in the 'Mary' programme - a definitive step from the James V programme!), and James IV (which will end the cycle, she says).