Festival theatre studio, Edinburgh
Catriona Faint’s witty performance as a pragmatist caught up in fanatical times is the heart of the latest historical drama from Rona Munro’s James Plays series
Anyone with half an eye on today’s global politics will know bad things happen when religious zealots come face to face. The same is true in our own history, as Rona Munro reminds us in the latest instalment of her James Play saga about Scotland’s Stewart kings.
Compared with the ambitious blockbusters with which she began the series 10 years ago, this episode feels more like a slight if diverting extension of the James Play universe. We have reached 1528 and, reacting to the early stirrings of the Scottish reformation, the Roman Catholic church is treating any opposition as heresy. The first to be burned at the stake is Patrick Hamilton (Benjamin Osugo) in punishment for his Lutheran preaching against the priesthood.
