‘It was a time of extraordinary violence,” says James Bonas. “There’s Elizabeth I deciding to have her cousin’s head chopped off, when her father had chopped her own mother’s head off! It’s incredible what they lived through.” The mother in question was, of course, Anne Boleyn, and the royal cousin losing her head was Mary, Queen of Scots, sent to the scaffold in 1587 and now the subject of a ballet co-created by director Bonas and choreographer Sophie Laplane for Scottish Ballet, premiering at this year’s Edinburgh international festival.

There are actually multiple festival shows revisiting Mary’s legacy in Edinburgh this summer, which all take different slants on the story of the girl who inherited the throne at just six days old, became queen consort of France as well as Scotland’s ruler, and was executed at the age of 44. “I think she was a badass,” says Mhairi McCall, whose show Mary, Queen of Rock! reimagines Mary as a rock star (drawing on icons from Tina Turner to Stevie Nicks), who returns to Scotland from France to find that rock music has been outlawed in favour of pop (that’s your Catholics v Protestants there). For Rona Johnston, writer/performer of Mary: A Gig Theatre Show, Mary’s story is a tragedy: “She could have done so much more but she was torn down in her prime.”

For Scottish Ballet’s own investigation into the myth of Mary, Laplane tells me: “We didn’t want to do a historical ballet.” The 16th century is definitely history, but what she means is they didn’t want to make something ploddingly factual, but rather dig into emotions and relationships, especially the one with Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth I. The story is told through Elizabeth’s memory and imagination as she lies on her deathbed, and it does sound like a bit of a fever dream: Mary’s baby, James, is represented by a balloon; young Queen Elizabeth appears on stilts; and Mary turns into a spider and eats her second husband, Lord Darnley.

Reinvigorating narrative ballet is very much Scottish Ballet’s agenda. Its last festival premiere, the hugely successful Coppélia in 2022, turned a corny 19th-century piece into a cautionary tale of AI and tech bros. The idea for this new ballet has been in the works for several years, back when Nicola Sturgeon was still first minister, “and we didn’t know if we’d be knocking on the door of another independence referendum,” says Bonas, putting English/Scottish friction to the fore.

The rollercoaster of political fortunes plays out in contemporary life just as it did in Mary’s time, with leaders lauded one moment, hunted the next. McCall’s rock show, with its feisty frontwoman, makes this point by drawing comparisons with women in the music industry. “We love to build up women in the media, to such a point that the only way for them to come is down, and we relish in their downfall,” she says.

The rapport and rivalry between Scottish Queen Mary and English Queen Elizabeth has been fodder for myriad books, TV shows and films. “It’s always very stereotyped,” says Laplane. “Elizabeth is frustrated and neurotic, and then Mary is riding her horse in the wild with her hair loose. When we started digging into it, it was interesting to find out that Mary was many, many things.”

“They’re always pitted against each other,” says Johnston. “And [in our show] we say the reason for that is because of the men in their lives, who were all power hungry.” After Mary’s first husband, Francis II, Dauphin of France, died, she married Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who orchestrated the murder of Mary’s friend and secretary David Rizzio. Mary may or may not have been involved in the subsequent plot to kill Darnley, but she did marry the man thought to be responsible, the Earl of Bothwell. “She met a lot of bad men, bad male influences,” agrees McCall. “And she kind of got shot down every step of the way.”

The Scottish lords then turned against Mary, and Elizabeth perceived her as a threat and had her imprisoned. For Johnston’s gig theatre show, she wanted to imagine a different landscape for the two women, where instead of competition and political paranoia there would have been sisterhood and solidarity, “imagining the two of them could have been partners in some way, rather than enemies”. McCall, too, wanted to go against “the age-old narrative of two women trying to tear each other down”.

Surprisingly, Mary and Elizabeth never actually met. However, they exchanged hundreds of letters, with an intensity Bonas jokingly likens to someone who strikes up a pen-pal relationship with someone in prison and falls in love with them. “They were very intimate in the letters, calling each other ‘my sister’,” says Bonas. “They absolutely recognised each other as two ruling queens and had a concept of their power and what that meant, being two women at the top of patriarchal power structures, both very vulnerable, actually, in their own ways. Needing one another, but in rivalry.” Laplane adds: “They were the only ones who could understand each other’s situation.”

Despite being a “dear sister”, Mary did ultimately plot against Elizabeth (although some dispute this), and Elizabeth did send Mary to her death. “But it took her a long time to get round to signing the death warrant,” insists Bonas. “[Elizabeth’s spymaster] Francis Walsingham pretty much had to force her into it in the end.” Bonas talks of the “stunt” Mary pulled at her execution, “where she turned up wearing black, and then she’s standing on the scaffold and whips it off, and she’s dressed in red. They understood their own brands. They were aware of their own political and cultural identities.” All of which makes them fascinating characters to keep exploring on stage. For Bonas, Mary was “proud and strong and determined and passionate, but she was as much of a political actor as Elizabeth. She’s iconic, she’s emblematic of Scottishness, but telling the story through Elizabeth gave us a chance to investigate English guilt.” (Bonas is English, with a Scottish mother; Laplane, like Mary, has French and British parentage.)

The atmosphere of political instability, and the sense of nowhere and no one being safe is something Laplane wanted to capture in the choreography, with a cast of shadowy figures ramping up the paranoia. She has brought her characteristic dance language to the work, full of sharp precision, detail and wit (as seen in previous works including Dextera, Click! (made for Ballet Black), and the film Dive, also co-created with Bonas). In her depiction of the three courts, Laplane finds humour amid the history. In the French court, she weaves in historical dance styles with a sense of refinement, but the men all have portly bellies (“Because back in the day, if you were rich, you ate a lot!”); in the English court, to show how stratified society was, she has Elizabeth rising up on stilts while the men all shuffle around her on their knees. The Scottish court was more horizontal, with genders mixing and more access to the queen, so they tried “to find that sense of community in the movement”, explains Bonas, “without just doing country dancing”.

The score for the ballet is by Mikael Karlsson and Michael P Atkinson, who also wrote the music for Coppélia, mixing period and modern sounds. And the designs are by Soutra Gilmour (Evita, Sunset Boulevard), referencing fashion designers who themselves used historical motifs, such as Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen. Cultural references bounce back and forth, with the aim of collapsing the five centuries between now and then, and synthesising eras – just as ballet itself does as an art form, forged in the Italian and French courts and now continually remade for the modern day, but always in touch with its roots. The aim is to help us see these distant figures as flesh-and-blood women. Bonas’s question is always: “How can you re-experience these characters in a way that makes them feel like people? How do you get them off the page?”

Johnston says she easily connected to Mary when she started reading about her. “She was sort of my age, in her 20s, when she was in charge of Scotland. You see quotes about how fun she was and how much people loved her.” McCall was drawn to the fact that there’s still so much we don’t know. “Did she intentionally betray Elizabeth and turn against her? Was she pushed into that? Was she completely innocent? We’ll never really know for sure what she thought, what she felt. Mary’s a great example of somebody who tried to do the right thing at every turn and was just set up to fail. I like to believe she thought: ‘I’ve tried to do everything right [but when it went against her], I may as well just go down the wrong path now!’ And I love her as a person for that.”

• Mary, Queen of Scots is at Festival theatre, 15-17 August; Mary: A Gig Theatre Show is at Gilded Balloon Patter House, 14-21 August; Mary, Queen of Rock! is at Cowbarn at Underbelly, Bristo Square until 24 August