Schiller is clearly big box-office. While Don Carlos packs out the Gielgud, the Derby Playhouse was bursting at the seams for this co-production (with The Big Picture Company) of his 1800 romantic tragedy. But I fear local audiences still haven't seen his original play: what they get from Uzma Hameed is a truncated, updated version that, in seeking to make the play more topical, only renders it confusing.
Seizing on Schiller's intersection of religion and politics, Hameed turns Mary Stuart into a classy Islamic refugee placed under "house arrest". To support her reading, Hameed both cuts and tinkers with Robert David Macdonald's translation. Thus Mary's uncle, instead of being the Cardinal of Lorraine, is a bearded imam. After an assassination attempt on Queen Elizabeth, a toque-wearing Middle Eastern diplomat, rather than the French ambassador, is sent packing. But, even if Islam is the fashionable enemy, hunting has still not been banned since Elizabeth turns up at Fotheringhay sportingly dressed for the chase.
In Grandage's Don Carlos, modern political parallels burst out of a period setting: here they seem to have been rigidly imposed on the text. It is true that Mary says she came to England as "a suppliant seeking asylum"; but no amount of textual wrenching can disguise the fact she is a dispossessed queen rather than a Belmarsh inmate. But the real problem is that Schiller was less concerned with religious persecution than the solitude of power: his Elizabeth is as much a tragic victim as Mary.
Hameed's production works best when it focuses, like Andrea Breth's recent Viennese revival, on the comparable isolation of the two queens. Given that there are only five in the cast members, Hameed has to make her point through matching projections and a stylised dance in which the two women both join. But Hilary Tones's mini-skirted Elizabeth implies she is forced into Machiavellian tactics as a means of political survival. And Chloe Angharad's moving Mary suggests a woman constantly haunted by her murderously erotic reputation. Michael Cronin's sub-fusc Burleigh also has the right devious gravity. But, while Sarah Blenkinsop's sliding screens and Chris Davey's sombre lighting lend the show visual panache, I still feel Hameed's high-concept production is based on a false premise.
· Until March 26. Box office: 01332 363275.
