★★★★★ Eleven hours, three plays and one huge standing ovation for Rona Munro’s Scottish trilogy.

Festival Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre
February 27, 2016

The age of binge watching and Netflix may rule the television world, but even the most ardent theatre lovers might baulk at the thought of 11 bum-atrophying hours of medieval history. On the other hand, as I sat, completely transfixed by the National Theatre of Scotland and National Theatre of Great Britain’s marathon triptych, exploring the turbulent lives, loves and losses of the three Scots kings named James, it struck me that the contemporary television penchant for epic narratives, recurring characters and natty twists offers the perfect inoculation for endurance performances such as this. 

It helps, of course, that the source material explored in these three plays is ripe with sex, death and a quintessentially Scottish brawn, but here it is plugged into an electrifyingly gripping energy. Thanks to playwright Rona Munro – astonishingly the first person to transport this period of Scottish history to the theatre – these dynamic characters are brought to life with superb clarity and a colloquial, whip-smart attitude. 

There is inevitably a distant resonance with Shakespeare’s history plays, and indeed these James plays,...