★★★★☆
Heads, you win — or do you? The play begins with a coin toss, dramatically staged, with Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams, both dressed in black velvet trouser suits, facing each other. Williams calls heads and the toss is made. We see the result on six TV screens that flank the stage.
Williams wins and is queen for a day. Stevenson, stripped of her jacket, goes straight to jail.
This production of Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 play, as adapted for the Almeida by the much-celebrated director Robert Icke, was first seen last year. Icke has stripped the production back to basics, with everyone in modern dress, which means a suit because Icke loves a suit. Here it is particularly effective, the stark costumes contrasting with a plot that is as rococo as it gets.
Everyone is scheming, lying, covering their back. Oops, it’s politics (I do hope that Theresa May goes to see this). Elizabeth has imprisoned Mary, who believes she is the rightful heir to Elizabeth’s throne. For Mary it’s all about France and being Catholic, for Elizabeth it’s all about England. She doesn’t trust the French, the Pope or, indeed, Mary. It’s all so Brexit that I am tempted to call it Quexit.
But this is the story of two women, imprisoned in different ways, functioning in a man’s world, surrounded by suitors (some courting both).
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“She is younger than me,” observes Queen E to her lover Leicester. “Well she doesn’t look it!” he soothes.
Icke also directs and the first few scenes do not connect as they should as we get to know the two women’s entourages (so many men in suits! So many letters being written and delivered). Williams is a quixotic, mercurial Elizabeth, sexual and insecure but also duplicitous. Stevenson as Mary is furious, conniving and, at times, shrill as she wobbles between thinking she will die or become queen (quite the contrast: Stevenson’s face gets a workout).
But when the two queens meet, claws very much extended, it becomes electric. I really could see the lightning. What had been political gets very personal and, from this moment, the play crackles with energy and intensity as the two sides fight it out on an elegant and simple set by Hildegard Bechtler that is all brick and paving.
The execution scene is stunning, with music provided by Laura Marling, as Mary strips herself of belongings and clothing while Elizabeth puts on her armour, the white powdered face, the red wig, the terrifying hoop skirt. Oh, it really did make me want to see it again, the other way round.
Box office: 0844 871 7627, to March 31