Who needs William Shakespeare or George R R Martin when we've got Rona Munro? By focusing on the lives of three lesser-known Scottish kings, Munro has tapped into the current zeitgeist for sword and sorcery, blood and guts, and heart-in-mouth political skulduggery made popular by Game of Thrones.
It's easy to compare The James Plays with Martin's world-conquering book and TV series (something the publicity does with glee), but the fact is, the stories told in these plays are scarier and more thrilling because it's all true. It actually happened. And like so many periods in British history, it's much more interesting than fiction.
Munro has chosen not to write biographies of these three men, but rather zoom in on a particular aspect or period in their life stories, and dramatise and expand upon it to astounding effect. The first play, James I: The Key Will Keep the Lock, is probably the most satisfying of the trilogy, telling the story of how James I went from being a boy prisoner of the English King Henry V, to crowned King of Scots. James learnt a lot from his upbringing in the English court, and wished to use this knowledge and education to reform Scotland. His ideas for reformed governance and taxation were modeled on what he'd seen working in England, but it took some convincing of the Scottish clansmen and lairds to adopt these new systems. Dictating that collected rents and taxes should pass to the royal household rather than the landowners was a highly controversial move, and made James few friends. His attempts to broker peace between the warring landowners was doomed from the start, but at least this idealist king tried, purely through a devotion to his homeland.
