James Plays

Through at the Edinburgh Festival today. Rain. Rain, and mair rain and umbrellas and crowds of sodden punters padding from place to place weather beaten, weathering beating their sweet sunny-climed faces to a puddle of consternation.
Martial bands marching. Traffic sloshing through puddles; and the new trams ding dinging down the middle of Princess Street. And a black dug down Rose Street. A labrador strutted straight down the middle of this pub heavy street looking neither right nor left, but straight ahead to some purpose.
I went with The Wan True Wolf to see the first of a trilogy of plays about the first three King James' of Scotland, written by Rona Munro and staged by the National Theatre of Scotland.
The NTS have an absurdly high strike rate in the high quality of their productions. Black Watch is probably still on tour somewhere in the world. This James I play: The Key Will Keep the Lock did not in any way disappoint.
The acting was engrossing. The staging and lighting was like a dream. The songs stirred the blood. The pacing perfect. The fights were pure ballet, movement and muscle and steel ringing; swords sweeping and tight knots of contact and the flying release of battle met and countered.
The writing in the play was funny, brutal, fucking this and fucking that, and eloquent: eloquent as the descriptions of the soaring fulmars in the mighty sky. These birds that were said to carry the souls of the dead that didn't make it to heaven. They seem free and happy, said the King having slain and executed his enemies, and isn't there sky enough for them?
A sure sign of its success was at the interval, when there was a queue round the block to purchase a copy of the book of the plays.
I go to see Jame II and James III next Sunday. If they match the quality of this first play I will be ecstatic, and that's even without the thrill of seeing Sofie Gråbøl act in the flesh.