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If ever
you’ve wondered about the antecedent for
such dueling diva-fests as Eve Harrington
and Margo Channing in All About Eve, or
Krystle Carrington and Alexis Colby on
Dynasty, or hell, even Nancy Kerrigan and
Tonya Harding, you need look no further than
Friedrich Schiller’s tinderbox of a play
Mary Stuart. Written in 1800, Schiller’s
masterwork (freshly adapted by Peter Oswald)
is back on Broadway after an absence of
nearly forty years in a gripping production
direct from London’s Donmar Warehouse.
Acutely directed by Phyllida Lloyd and
starring Tony Award-winner Janet McTeer as
Mary, Queen of Scots, and Harriet Walter as
her arch-nemesis, Queen Elizabeth I, this
Mary Stuart has all the backstabbing
political and sexual intrigue that viewers
expect of Showtime’s popular series, The
Tudors—or of American politics during an
election year. Complemented by scenic
designer Anthony Ward’s atmospheric staging
and lighting that fills the stage with
shadows as deep and menacing as any scene
from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (or James
Whale’s The Old Dark House), both McTeer and
Walter give bravura performances that are
both haunting and haunted. Backed by a
masterful ensemble of male actors in
contemporary dress—the better for us to draw
timely parallels to our own troubled
epoch—these two women rule the stage with a
sangfroid and hauteur befitting such regal
presences, and when climactically, they
meet, the result is thrilling theatre.
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