Of Shakespeare’s history plays, only Macbeth is set north of the English border. Rona Munro’s new trilogy addresses the imbalance.

When the English director Laurie Sansom arrived for his first day on the job as the new Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Scotland in 2013, he had some legacy issues to deal with. “Literally, the first thing I saw was three enormous doorstop plays sitting on my desk,” Sansom laughs. “My first job was to read them.” Those doorstops were a trilogy, The James Plays, by Scottish historian and playwright Rona Munro (pictured right) and they would come to dominate Sansom’s year. “I was just hoping they would be half as good as I’d dreamed they’d be,” he says. “Thank God they were. In fact, they were brilliant.”

Inspired by Shakespeare’s cycle of Richard II, the Henries IV, V and VI, and Richard III, Munro dug deep into the fractured and politically charged histories of three Stewart Kings who ruled Scotland in the 15th century. The trilogy would become the sensation of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2014 and, against the background of the Scottish vote for independence from the United Kingdom, create a new signature work for the...