"An Englishman will never show a Scotsman justice," says the arraigned Mary Stuart in David Harrower's new version of Schiller's romantic tragedy. But I swear it is not Sassenach pride that left me stubbornly unmoved by Vicky Featherstone's strangely stolid production for the much-acclaimed National Theatre of Scotland.
Like Phyllida Lloyd in her Donmar revival, Featherstone puts the rival queens, Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart, into period costume, and the surrounding men into modern suits. But where Lloyd used this to highlight the shared isolation of the two women in a world of male conspiracy, no such idea animates this revival. The anonymous suits are reduced to standing around in a polite semicircle like waxworks while the women emote. And Neil Warmington's drab, high-walled set simply conveys a generalised sense of imprisonment.
Schiller's greatness resides in his mixture of passion and politics. You see this most famously in the unhistorical scene where Elizabeth and Mary meet in the grounds of Fotheringay Castle; but even this lacks its usual overflowing theatricality because it is interrupted by an interval, and there is little sense that the freshly freed Mary enjoys an animalistic liberation before succumbing to caustic abuse. And the great moment when the slippery Leicester switches sides, and coolly sacrifices a fellow plotter, misses the point made in Peter Oswald's recent translation that political survivors always justify villainy in the "national interest."
The best reason for catching this revival is Siobhan Redmond's remarkable Elizabeth. Starting as a glitteringly regal figure encased in wide pannier skirts, she gradually turns into a vulnerable woman. When she orders her beloved Leicester be taken to the tower, her voice breaks at the loss of her last prospect of physical happiness. And, as Redmond announces that she is tired of rule and life, she invests the character with an aching Shakespearean weariness at the solitude of power.
Catherine Cusack's black-robed, close-cropped Mary is perfectly acceptable without suggesting either the character's magnetic aura or huge journey from political rage to spiritual grace. And the surrounding courtiers and plotters, with the exception of John Stahl's burly Burleigh and Robin Laing's impetuous Mortimer, are a thinly characterised lot. As both Andrea Breth's Viennese production and Lloyd's London version showed, Schiller's play works best when the doomed queens are seen to be victims of Machiavellian males. What undermines this revival, co-produced with the Glasgow Citizens and the Edinburgh Lyceum, is the absence of any vibrant political context.
· Until October 21. Box office: 0141-429 0022. Then touring.
