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.