Sydney Theatre Company premiered author Kate Mulvany’s Mary Stuart early in 2019 where it received strong reviews, with Limelight giving it four-and-a-half stars. For 2022, the Perth Festival has revived the production with Performing Lines WA, in association with Fremantle Theatre Company, keeping many elements, but altering others.

Caroline Brazier again plays Mary Stuart, the imprisoned former Queen of Scotland and France, as someone apparently resigned to her likely execution, while nursing an inner passion for vengeance. Perth designers Bruce McKinven and Amalia Lambert have retained the stripped-back period-reference of Mel Page’s Sydney costuming for the men, again using stylised post-19th century black suits fitted with pure white Elizabethan ruffs. This emphasises the sense of almost interchangeably masculine political darkness which surrounds our female protagonists.

The sets for both productions employ raw wood, stepped performance levels, and diagonal angles which plunge into the back of the stage. In most scenes, McKinven and Lambert offer a fairly flat, horizontal space, so when they reveal a triangle opening out to the audience, this suddenly throws the action into the vanishing point at the triangle’s axis for a uniquely compelling and climatic event— namely Mary’s execution. In this moment, devoid of text, it...