Theatre Alba can be relied upon to produce something worthwhile in Duddingston Kirk gardens and proved that last night with their production of Robert McLellan's Mary Stewart.

Unfortunately the climate can't be relied upon to provide pleasant conditions in which to watch an outdoor show and so it proved.  I had taken the precaution of putting thermals under my cords and wore a down ski jacket and a Helly Hansen cold weather sailing hat so I was well equipped to stay warm and to withstand the rain that drizzled periodically during the first act, poured down during the interval (we were under cover then) and drizzled continuously throughout the second act.

There were not many of us there but we all stuck it out as of course did the actors who delivered a fine performance of an interesting play.  Theatregoers are more familiar with Schiller's Maria Stuart and the Donizetti opera based on it.  Those cover Mary's imprisonment in England and her execution and include a wholly fictional meeting between her and Elizabeth I of England.

McLellan's play covers ground which I imagine is as familiar to Scottish school children today as it was in my childhood.  Essentially it deals with her struggle to maintain her authority over the quarrelsome and self-serving Scottish nobility as a Catholic monarch, a very young and inexperienced one, in the early and fervent days of the Reformation.  It opens just after the murder of Rizzio, explores Darnley's repeated efforts to be given the crown matrimonial and her resistance to that, Darnley's murder, her subsequent marriage with Bothwell and ends with her setting off to imprisonment in Loch Leven.

Her personal and political lives were both steeped in tragedy and nowhere was that better illustrated in the play than in the scene in which Bothwell enumerates all the forces that are arrayed against her from her former friends in France, her cousin Elizabeth, the protestant church in Scotland, most of the Scottish nobility and even her (half) brother James.

The cast were mostly Theatre Alba regulars and worked well together.  Andrea Mckenzie made an excellent Mary, exceptional given that she took on the part at very short notice.  Of the others I particularly enjoyed Robin Thomson's devious Maitland whose surface humour concealed an ice-cold calculating interior.  His chuckled "hoots, toots mon" could well find a happy home with me in future.