Latest news with #1536
Telegraph
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
1536: Gen Z does Tudor England – and it's startlingly effective
We're in a bucolic Essex marsh in 1536. Anna is wiping herself down after a romp against a tree with her wealthy (and betrothed) lover Richard. But then news arrives from London (it's taken three days to travel): the Queen has been arrested. Anna and her friends Jane and Mariella know this is vaguely significant (ditzy Jane struggles to remember the King's name), but they also can't believe a King would throw his wife in the tower. She'll be out in a few days says Anna. She's probably free already. Ava Pickett's effervescent, extremely funny debut refreshes the tired story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn by filtering it through the perspective of three market village girls who look like Tudor peasants but speak like potty-mouthed Gen Zedders. In this hidden place among the reeds, which under set designer Max Jones seems to glow like a Vermeer painting, these women speak their minds with a subversive, forthright clarity that would never be afforded them publicly, or indeed one assumes in 1536 at all. Siena Kelly's playful, radiant Anna (whose name nods to Boleyn) loves the power her beauty has over the village men, although privately she craves stability and love. Liv Hill's endearingly guileless, soon to be married Jane (Seymour?) prefers to be good and play by the rules. Clever pragmatic Mariella (Tanya Reynolds), who is nursing a broken heart, intuitively understands that the world is not made for women like Anna. Pickett posits that the treatment of Anne Boleyn by Henry and his court – effectively a proto-case of slut-shaming – is a paradigm moment of almost mythic force in the virulent history of the gender wars. She gives her thesis lively succour too, as the news of further arrests and the shift in public opinion in London against the Queen gather like a dust cloud on the horizon, turning this summer-scorched pocket of merrie England into a place of fomenting male violence and sexual hatred. Newly married Jane is spotted in the market with a black eye. Anna is learning that her power only goes so far. Mariella tries to warn Anna of the forces gathering against her but then finds herself engulfed in a crisis that threatens them all. Much of the energy of Lyndsey Turner's artfully stylised, superbly performed production comes from the back-and-forth banter between these three women, whose scythe-like wit and anachronistic irreverence dazzle like rain in the sun. For too long, however, the repartee is a substitute for actual drama, and when that drama suddenly erupts, it's too much too late. And although Pickett blends together 16th and 21st century sensibilities with audacious skill, her points about female value and agency are ultimately familiar, while a stylised moment from Turner that has Anna hurling herself about in frustration has a crudeness the dialogue largely avoids. Yet Pickett characterises her protagonists with eye-popping vitality and, thanks in no small part to outstanding performances from Reynolds, Kelly and Hill, in ways that vividly energise our understanding of historic female experience at the hands of men. 'I just keep, thinking about, about what she must've been thinking,' says Jane of the newly executed Anne Boleyn. 'About whether she knew, did she know, that her husband would do that to her?'
The Guardian
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I don't buy it' … Ava Pickett on her play about Anne Boleyn's treason and incest
Like many British schoolchildren, Ava Pickett chanted the 'Divorced, beheaded, died' rhyme about Henry VIII's six wives – and it has stayed in her head ever since. So much so that her play 1536 pivots around the last days of the second wife, Anne Boleyn. Pickett's history lessons covered Boleyn's magnificent rise – which sparked a passion so great the king bent constitutional law to marry her – as well as the torrid details of her downfall and beheading. Pickett believed the 'facts' (that Boleyn committed treason, that she slept with her brother) until she didn't. 'The older I got,' says the 31-year-old, 'the more I thought, 'I don't buy that.'' Named after the year of Boleyn's death, 1536 comes at the queen's story sideways. She is not seen on stage but is talked about by three young women who meet in an Essex field, in between work, to quibble and gossip about men, haircuts and the king's bride. Their predicaments gain chilling resonances as the local men become more puritanical, mirroring the patriarchal violence of Henry's court. This is not Pickett's first foray into historical drama – she has also written for Hulu series The Great, based on the life of Catherine the Great. She says 1536 grew from her interest in 'the whispered conversations between women' about Boleyn. ''Do you think she did it, though?' 'Do you really think he's going to kill her?'' Another oblique question was what the king's marriage has to do with them. 'That's something I really care about,' says Pickett. 'The way it permeates day-to-day lives.' By 'it' she means misogyny and the trickle-down effects of patriarchy, which, she makes clear, is not just the stuff of historical drama. 'For me it's absolutely about now,' she says. 'Of course it is. We still lower our voices and say, 'He did this thing – do you think that's weird?' We still question ourselves … There are men in positions of power who have done absolutely terrible things to women. What does it mean to watch them get elected or re-elected?' While writing the play, the misogyny around her became so glaring that she couldn't unsee the way it filtered through society. 'I'm interested in the subtlety [of it] and the way that men can change the air in a room,' she says. 'It's hard to name, hard to call out.' 1536 won the Susan Smith Blackburn prize for female, transgender and non-binary playwrights in 2024. At the ceremony, Pickett called it 'a love letter to friendship'. She has a circle of female friends, some of whom she has known since school. This isn't as cosy as it sounds. These friendships, as glorious as they are, come with prickly edges: 'I feel so known by them and it can feel dangerous when you're fighting with someone who has known you since you were 14.' This is the side of 'sisterhood' that is not always acknowledged, she continues, because as women 'you're meant to be on the same side'. In 1536, Pickett felt 'a need to explore the ugliness of friendship. I think this idea that 'We're best friends and we'll always be best friends' in sisterhood is so untouchable. But it just isn't true. You have to really work at your friendships. That's beautiful, but it does also means that there are moments of real savagery.' Pickett started out wanting to act. Born in Essex, she was one of the first in her family to go to university (at Middlesex), and followed up her theatre degree with a master's from the Central School of Speech and Drama. 'That was great but when I came out it went so badly. I was one of the only people not to get an agent, I didn't know anyone in the industry, I was working in a cinema and had no money, so eventually I had to move back to Clacton. I was so embarrassed. I had made such a big deal about going to uni and wanting to be an actor.' And yet, at her lowest ebb, she started to write a sitcom, Essex Girls, about an eldest daughter who goes to London to realise her dreams and comes back having failed. 'I'd auditioned for a producer a couple of years earlier and still had his email so I wrote saying, 'Could you read it?' He read it and said, 'You have to come back to London.'' She did, and Pickett has straddled the worlds of theatre and TV ever since. She currently has a satire in development with Derry Girls' Lisa McGee. 'I have been incredibly lucky in that I have benefited from people holding the door open,' she says. 'It's so easy to back people when they've had some success. If you believe in someone's talent, you should get behind them. A producer got behind me with Essex Girls and it changed my life. My agent got behind me and it changed my life. Think about how many people would have kept going if someone had got behind them early.' 1536 is at the Almeida theatre, London, 6 May-7 June
