Coup Versus Calamity

Of the many stylish touches in Scottish Ballet’s “Mary, Queen of Scots,” the titular Tudor’s black pointe shoes are my favourite. Sleek and surprisingly sexy, they sum up the theatrical esprit of this production co-created by Sophie Laplane and James Bonas, here receiving its London premiere after debuting at Edinburgh International Festival last autumn. Their vision is expansive but tidily marshalled, bringing order and spark to a convoluted patch of history. Applying an imaginative glaze that blurs certain details and infills others, they create a zipping account of Mary Stuart’s ill-fated royal tenure in sixteenth-century Britain. There are some uneven shifts in tone and a slightly crowded cast of characters, but the funhouse lens has the effect of magnifying the humanity across this eventful chronicle, creating a bold, lively reframing.

Performance

Scottish Ballet: “Mary, Queen of Scots” by Sophie Laplane and James Bonas

Place

Sadler’s Wells, London, UK, March 5, 2026

Words

Sara Veale

Roseanna Leney as Mary in Scottish Ballet’s “Mary, Queen of Scots.” Photograph by Andy Ross

A quick run-down of the history here. Mary, the erstwhile Queen of Scotland, entered a succession of strategic marriages between 1558 and 1567 to strengthen her royal position. With the Scottish Reformation churning in the background, her influence dwindled in Scotland but began to pose a threat to the English throne, occupied by her cousin Elizabeth I, who went on to imprison Mary for 19 years before having her beheaded on charges of conspiracy.

Scottish Ballet’s digested version hits most of these narrative keynotes, starting with Mary’s (Roseanna Leney) wedding to the Dauphin of France at 15 through to the blows of the executioner three decades later. Coup and calamity vie for position between these bookends. The first act ends with the murder of David Rizzio (Bruno Micchiardi), Mary’s closest advisor, the aftermath stylised in a gruesome tableau that calls to mind the shocking opening scene of Emerald Fennell’s new “Wuthering Heights.” The second closes on her own brutal slaying by the English court, Leney stepping into the gallows in a shimmering crimson two-piece, a juicy twist on the apocryphal red undergarments Mary supposedly wore for her execution.

The production establishes a racy subtext early on with a slinky, prowling movement vocabulary, hips first and torsos following. This shifts to overtone as a BDSM motif emerges: think leather masks, shadowy colourways, and finger-sucking man servants who shuffle on their knees before the towering English queen (Harvey Littlefield, in a gender-neutral casting, mounted high on stilts). There’s a gripping precision to these early stretches of choreography, all careful sprinting and spinning across crisp pyramids and sinuous montages. The ballet loses some of this tautness as it swings between different settings and spectacles, but there are several points when the ensemble strikes on something like a flow state, shapeshifting with eye-grabbing fluidity and a runaway intensity.

Roseanna Leney as Mary and Harvey Littlefield as Younger Elizabeth in Scottish Ballet’s “Mary, Queen of Scots.” Photograph by Andy Ross

Littlefield plays Elizabeth in her younger years, his sinewy legs trussed in New Romantic bloomers; elsewhere, a woman tackles the role of Mary’s son, the men of the Scottish faction don dresses, and a racy love affair is imagined between Rizzio and Mary’s second husband, Lord Darnley (Evan Loudon) – gender-bending slants that thicken the web of power plays. Rizzio and Darnley provide the ballet’s most passionate coupling, shirts off, foreheads touching, limbs entwined. The suspicion and scrutiny that fly between Mary and Elizabeth also raise the temperature, though their rapport is limited by the fact—upheld in this reimagining—that the two never actually met.

This intrusion of reality illustrates the challenges of portraying complex histories through dance – the very things that enrich the action often complicate the storytelling. The ballet employs some creative timekeeping to wrangle its various plots and narrative layers, which include a second Elizabeth whose anguished recollections in old age frame the story (Charlotta Öfverholm, an impassioned yet distractingly tiny counterpart to Littlefield’s long-legged monarch). The story lingers on certain events, like a wistful, poignant reflection on Elizabeth’s inability to have children; other scenes fast-forward through their specifics, leaving whiffs of intrigue and sometimes ambiguity in their wake. Knowing that some figures have been excised, and with Mary herself occasionally backgrounded, imaginary characters like Kayla-Maree Tarantolo’s emcee-style Jester seem expendable in the wider picture.

Roseanna Leney as Mary and Harvey Littlefield as Younger Elizabeth in Scottish Ballet’s “Mary, Queen of Scots.” Photograph by Andy Ross

On balance, though, this is a rousing piece of theatre, full of distinctive, dramatically conceived flashes of staging that have stayed with me since the curtain drop: the glassy, darting reconnaissance of Elizabeths’ royal spies; the lilac-clad Scottish court pinwheeling in adoration of young Mary; the fuck-off width of Catherine de’ Medici’s cage-like metallic petticoat; Mikael Karlsson and Michael P Atkinson’s lush score, with its curlicue notes and oom-pah-pah. It’s a lot of ideas with a lot of accompanying visuals, some of them competing, but there’s scope to iron out the wrinkles and pin down the staying power. As Mary herself insisted: “In my end is my beginning.”

Sara Veale

Sara Veale is a London-based writer and editor. She's a member of the UK Dance Critics' Circle and has written about dance for the Observer, the Spectator, Harper's Bazaar, Auditorium, Gramophone and more. Her book, Wild Grace: The Untamed Women of Modern Dance, was published by Faber in 2025.

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