Mary Stuart @ Royal Lyceum

With its artistic director Vicky Featherstone at the helm, the National Theatre of Scotland passes the simplest test here: for quality entertainment. The audience is immersed, for two hours, in a thoroughly gripping story. This can't be easy when everybody knows what's about to happen to Mary Queen of Scots, but Schiller's original scenario is riven with tension. It builds up to an imagined meeting between Mary, now facing death, and Elizabeth I of England. Catherine Cusack fully convinces in the title role – full of anger, liveliness and passion. It's easy to imagine why men, on all sides, love Mary, and why Elizabeth hates her. Elizabeth (Siobhan Redmond) is her opposite, but also tragic: she rules by suppressing her womanhood. Yet private passions – jealousy, love and hatred – still drive the politics. If there's any weakness it's structural: the scenes after Mary's final soul-searching and death feel unnecessary, only making more apparent the tension that has existed up to that point.