Regal turn in rain and rage

There are rare signs of highbrow life on Shaftesbury Avenue. For the first time in contemporary theatrical history two plays by that thrilling Enlightenment playwright Friedrich Schiller have been presented within months. Hard upon Michael Grandage's great production of Don Carlos comes Phyllida Lloyd's applauded revival of Mary Stuart.

It settles down well on transfer from the Donmar, though Miss Lloyd's idea of emphasising the isolation and parallel situation of Elizabeth and Mary by dressing them in period costumes, while their male lovers and advisers wear modern suits, still fails to persuade me.

This, the second of Schiller's psychologically nuanced history plays to go in for mythic rewriting of 16th-century history and of monarchy caught in its coils, just seethes with dramatic tension. It puts Elizabeth at feuding fatal odds with Mary, Queen of Scots.

Through the plotting, politicking and deceptions of terrific Guy Henry as a drawling, duplicitous Leicester, Rory Kinnear's smitten Mortimer and David Horovitch's nicely desiccated Lord Burleigh the regal tables turn. Janet McTeer's selfpitying, Amazonian Mary begins in guilt but goes serene and confessed to execution. Elizabeth, by contrast, passes from grandeur to vulnerable loneliness.

The two Queens never met in real life and it is Schiller's fascinating conceit to dramatise their encounter. Against the backdrop of Anthony Ward's black backwall, which is the set's only noticeable feature, Miss Lloyd brilliantly stages the royal meeting in a shower of rain and a deluge of Mary Stuart's rage.

Harriet Walter's magnetic Elizabeth, well conceived as a cold, flirty victim of sexual jealousy, radiates grandeur in black and gold. She looks rapiers rather than mere daggers at Miss McTeer's Amazonian Mary Stuart, whose quavering appeals give way to a fury that seals her famous fate.

Until 14 January. Information: 0870 890 1101.

Mary Stuart

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