Rona Munro sets a sapphic love story against the tumultuous backdrop of the early Scottish
Reformation in the newest installation in her James Plays series. At once intimate and
political, James V: Katherine has an emotional cadence that speaks as much to its
contemporary audiences as its historical context.
The play centres around the burning of Patrick Hamilton for heresy in 1528, and the
subsequent trial of his sister Katherine Hamilton. Upon the historical incident around which
the play is fashioned, Munro breathes life into a love story between Katherine and Patrick’s
widow, Jenny. It is an imagined addition, but one that nevertheless affirms the place of queer
women in history, most of whom have been obscured, erased, or ignored. As historical
consultant Ashley Douglas notes, that the love story of James V: Katherine is fictional does
not mean there were not myriad others just like it, unmistakably real but absent in the
historical record.
There is no weak link in the production’s four-person ensemble; Catriona Faint’s Katherine
Hamilton is at once formidable and fearful as she stands to face Sean Connor’s ready
embodiment of the petulant boy-king James V. Benjamin Osugo’s Patrick Hamilton
sometimes fails to convince us of the fervour of his religious zealotry, but the actor finds his
footing as the dogmatic Spence who leads the ecclesiastical court and is comically mocked by
all around him.
It is Alyth Ross as Jenny who captivates, her charming earthly naivety metamorphosing into
measured wisdom by the play’s curtain. At times the dialogue is a little too overt, leading to
moments that would sound clunky in the mouth of any seasoned actor. Faint and Ross are
nevertheless successful at curating authenticity between their characters and giving us
something to root for amid the frictional religious and political context.
‘Are women ever remembered?’ James V proposes the question, as much to the audience as
to Katherine. If the bleak answer is a simple no, especially when it comes to queer women,
Rona Munro’s newest James play is an attempt to resurrect the memory of all those forgotten
women, upon the canvas of a historical moment within sixteenth-century Scotland. Though at points it lacks subtlety, I wonder that subtlety is what we should be calling for in the
redemptive act of rewriting historical drama, and history itself, to place women and queer
people at the forefront of the narrative. Surely, this is a task that calls for the very boldness
with which Munro infuses her script.
James V: Katherine is a response to centuries of invisibility, unapologetic in its centring of
love between women. It destabilises what historical drama should be, opening the potentiality
of imagining queer stories into silences that, far from indicating absence, are crying out to be
filled.
Image by Mihaela Bodlovic provided via Capital Theatres Press Release