Does Daniel Cahill play our greatest king in new Rona Munro play at Eden Court
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Scottish actor Daniel Cahill admits he might have been carrying a dead king inside him for the last eight years, ever since he played the complicated, damaged young James IV.
Daniel was just a first year drama student when he got the chance he was desperate for, to audition for Rona Munro’s ground-breaking James Plays and the role of a boy prince who becomes king.
Now Rona Munro’s original trilogy of plays about the 15th century Stewart kings has got its sequel.
James IV is heading to Inverness and Daniel is back in the role, this time as the very much grown-up, driven and possibly best king Scotland ever had.
For Daniel, those plays, actors, playwright Rona Munro and director Laurie Sansom have long been part of his life.
The excitement is in his voice as he recalls his hunger to be part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s original production in 2014.
He laughed: “I don’t think anybody expected me to get it with the scale of the production, the fact it was going to be done by the National Theatre of Scotland and was possibly the biggest theatre event happening in Britain at the time – especially in the lead-up to the referendum.
“I auditioned at the end of my first year and I got it and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland really supported me to do it but keep doing my degree. They came and externally invigilated, assessed and kept me up with written course work as it was a BA, with all the academia of that, I was on.
“As an actor I had always wanted to be in a show for the National Theatre of Scotland. The play The Black Watch was one of the first plays I saw.
“I didn’t know theatre could be like that.
“I remember speaking to Anne Henderson who was the casting director at the National Theatre of Scotland and I was constantly begging her to let me audition for Black Watch.
“She kept saying ‘No darling, you should be in the next Black Watch!’ meaning the next big production.
“I didn’t think there would ever be anything as good as Black Watch.
“But it turned out she was right, there was something bigger on the horizon, The James Plays!”
Daniel recalls his first glimpse of the lines.
“Even reading the scripts for it was momentous, and it was my first introduction to Rona’s writing as well and it embodied everything I loved about theatre, grand storytelling, these really human characters, these high-stakes dramas.”
In her play James IV, time has seen the young king – who killed his father James III – in power, pushing to do his best for Scotland and spread her reputation, as two young Moorish women come to the court.
Daniel talks about the perspective the two characters, Ellen and Anne give to the play and our view of James IV.
“I think the characters Ellen and Anne are two additions to Rona’s long list of powerful women. The story that they are telling through their perspective of James is a really unique and fresh take on a well-known and historical figure.
“I believe there are enough stories and YouTubes and documentary videos about the man himself. But I think it is way more interesting to have a play about the people around him and the relationships he had with them rather than always being about him. There are enough plays about James, there aren’t enough about other people of the time and Rona has always said she is not interested in people who had a voice, she is interested in the people who didn’t.
“I think this play is a phenomenal example of that. James is there and doing what James did and it is all historically accurate as well. But you are seeing it through the unique Rona Munro lens which is about how the people around him would see it and how these females would see is – and both established and aspiring matriarchal characters would see it, experiencing a man like that in a time like that.”
A poem, Ane Blak Moor ( A Black Moor), describes a black woman who would have been at the heart of James’s famous tournaments of the day.
It is historically accurate and is used in the play to look at a more diverse mix of races at the Scottish court than once might have been thought.
Daniel said: “With this play Rona is taking this perceived understanding people would have and said ‘Yes, but this has also happened’. She has taken this poem by William Dunbar, the machar of the time – and this is all backed up by historical evidence, receipts, ledgers, documents, all of this stuff happened.
“And Rona was fascinated by the motivation of someone like William Dunbar to write a poem like that – why would he have done it and why was it OK to do that?
“It’s something we often encountered, it’s hard not to look at these historical characters through a modern point of morality. We can’t really judge them by our standards and that exists not just in the James plays but in a lot of historical plays that have become outdated or have become somewhat archaic, such as The Merchant Of Venice and certain characters in that.
“When you hear that poem, there’s not a person in the room that thinks it’s OK. In this play, instead of having “the true mirror” as she did in the third play, Rona is using the whole play and succession of events to become the mirror and show to society and say ‘Look, this has been happening for far too long!’.
“You all know, the atmosphere in the room changes, you hear people catch their breath and I can see people looking away and looking uncomfortable. So we all understand this is a horrible thing.
“The clever thing Rona also does is uses the fanfare of James IV’s tournaments which he is famous for, where all of Europe would come to Scotland to this hub of culture and this display of pageantry – almost like the World’s Fair every year James would establish this huge gathering of European communities.
“At a time where we have divisions through Europe and you think ‘Look at this otherness, this us and them‘, it’s interesting that in the play it is not just Dunbar’s relationship to the Moorish attendants, it’s also James’s relationship to the Highlanders and the Gaels and the subjugation that James started in his reign against the Highland communities. That has been a root cause and led to Gaelic heading towards being almost an extinct language and culture.
“So it is making the point that this exists throughout humanity – how long is it going to go on for and what is it going to take for it to stop? – at least, that’s what I think.”
It is interesting hearing Daniel talk about the now grown-up James IV he plays in this latest play, no longer the boy trying to write poems to impress his father, but a warrior – and his father’s killer.
Did the adult still write poems?
Daniel laughed: “After the rebuke and scorning from father trying to write poems he lost the love for writing poems, but he kept the appreciation for art and poetry. He was known very much as a renaissance king and focused his attentions more on being a warrior. After he killed his dad, he set about reforming Scotland unifying Scotland by himself. To do that – and that is another historical accuracy – James was renowned as both an incredible military general and a horrible military general because he would never give orders to soldiers he would always just run into battle himself. He would be there with his whole army but would just break ranks and run in! Asked why – and this is all recorded history too – he said ‘The people in my kingdom serve me every day, abiding the laws, paying the taxes, trusting my judgments, the least I can do for them is fight for them’. So he wouldn’t give orders, he would very much try and do it himself. And I think that sums up James pretty well, he is trying to be all things to all men. It’s almost like an act of atonement, or a coping mechanism – a smokescreen to detract from the fact he killed his dad. Or the wearing of the chain which was a public display of penance, maybe so the people of Scotland felt OK about the king becoming the king after regicide because he was paying for it every day.
All the things James did taking the courts round the country and trying to establish a universal quality of fairness and justice, was an act of reparation, we well as lots of physical acts of penance, like running to Whithorn, doing all this warfare was all for the benefit of the country, never really for him. He wanted to be the opposite of his dad. He was massively regarded as Scotland’s best ever king and he was the last monarch to die in battle which probably surprises no-one.
He is an immensely complicated man. Beneath all that bravado and rough exterior of a warrior king there lies a really damaged teenage boy who just wanted his dad to love him …”
For Daniel time has added insight to how he sees the young prince he played last time around.
“With the perspective of playing James IV again, you realise how badly he was treated. It was tough at times because it is not nice being treated like that and you distance yourself as an actor.
“But it’s an invaluable resource I have now in playing James IV and I talk to the director Laurie Sansom and Rona about this – I have all his memories.
“The memories of the character - because of that canon of plays - are my memories of playing that character when he was younger.
“So when he talks about his dad or when anybody talks to him about his dad, an actor would usually have to imagine that circumstance and imagine those inner interactions. But I actually have the real world memories of that!”
Asked if James the character he embraced so young still exists inside Daniel, the actor says: “James is probably the only character I’ve really ever carried with me, not for any other reason than he has been with me the longest.
“But being James when you’re younger and older, it’s hard to deny that part of you.”
Daniel chuckles: “But I don’t walk about thinking I’m the king of Scotland!”
James IV: Queen Of The Fight from Raw Material and Capital Theatres in association with the National Theatre of Scotland is at Eden Court from Wednesday, November 2 to Saturday, November 5. Tickets and details: https://eden-court.co.uk/event/james-iv-queen-of-the-fight
