Friday, September 16, 2011

Mary Stuart, playing at ACT Theater in Seattle, September 9 – October 9, 2011

This production of Frederick Schiller’s 200-year old play about Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth is a treat --beautifully acted, and a fascinating imagined version of the two queens and their political situations.

From an authorship-doubt angle, it has a lot to offer. The Elizabethan court is shown as a  world of secrecy, hidden actions & agendas, and plausible deniability. William Cecil and Robert Dudley come off as cold, calculating, and entirely self-interested, a perspective familiar to Oxfordians but less so to the general public who know them from popular films as loyal, decent servants to QE. Elizabeth herself is conflicted and isolated, using sex (or its promise) to influence men in her orbit, and is revealed as a woman whose whole identity has been dominated by the scandals of her parentage.

The play has political relevance to our own time too, implying that a high level of state secrecy has disadvantages for the ruler(s) as well as the ruled. When truth can’t be freely voiced, it can be easily manipulated, leaving even an absolute monarch in the dark as to what is really going on and what kind of characters exist behind the smiling servile masks of advisors and attendants.
 
Mary Stuart offers a view of the Elizabethan period that could pave the way for more openness to the AQ--- it suggests that the roles and motivations of key court figures as they have come down to us may be incomplete or even doctored versions, and that “history” itself may actually be a sort of mask.

Review by: Jennifer Newton, member Seattle Shakespeare/Oxford Society