This was her starting point one writer wondering how such an empathic and sensitive fellow writer could sink so low. He’ll write about a headache or his fear of death or moaning that he’s never being paid – all this stuff I could identify with – and then you look at that poem and go, ‘Why did you do that?’” “It is very uncomfortable reading for a modern audience. “The language is derogatory and designed to diminish,” says Munro, who drew on the work of historian Onyeka Nubia. Commonly known as Of Ane Blak-Moir, it has been called “ precociously racist” – precocious because it pre-dates European colonialism by more than a century.įull cast in rehearsals for James IV: Queen of the Fight. In particular, Munro looks to a poem by William Dunbar addressed to a woman of African descent who had arrived in the Scottish court. “That story has not been told – it’s not that it’s not true.” “Ellen was right at the heart of these huge political tournaments that were being staged by James to show the power of the Scottish court to the English and French,” says Sansom, pointing out that James’s right-hand man was from the Iberian peninsula, almost certainly black and married to a white Scottish woman. Here, two high-born Moorish women, Ellen, the eponymous Queen of the Fight (Danielle Jam) and Anne (Laura Lovemore) became wealthy establishment figures. In James IV, she finds her story in a court living under the threat of war, where royal tournaments serve as displays of wealth and power. The themes that are unexamined in Scottish history are about how women relate to power, what does it mean for children to be monarchs and, in this one, what happens when you get global majority people coming into a country like Scotland for the first time?” They illuminate something that is part of human nature. “But good history stories chime with an audience because they’re contemporary. “People imagine a history play is going to be incomprehensible unless they do lots of homework,” she says. The trick in writing a history play, says Munro, is in finding a good story.
She has also written a “small and intense” James V for production next year and is ready to set to work on James VI (James I of England). Even then, she had in mind a sequence of box-set proportions.Īs well as James IV, now being mounted for an autumn tour by director Laurie Sansom and co-produced by Raw Material and Capital Theatres in association with NTS, there is Mary, which will be directed by Roxana Silbert at London’s Hampstead theatre. But Munro’s sights were set higher still. In 2014, it seemed the height of ambition when The James Plays appeared as an all-day marathon in a mighty three-way collaboration between the National Theatre, the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) and the Edinburgh international festival. ‘The history of black people in Britain has been ignored, marginalised and made invisible’ … Rona Munro.
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