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The Guardian
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
1536 review – three Tudor friends throw sharp light on Anne Boleyn's execution
Ava Pickett's debut play, a product of the Almeida's new writing scheme, comes laden with accolades including the Susan Smith Blackburn prize. All the fuss is justified. Set against the impending execution of Anne Boleyn, 1536 is an effortlessly funny, bold and ballsy play, which asks the question: just how much have things really changed for women today? While the historical backdrop is dramatic, this is largely a play of small and arresting moments. Max Jones's stark set – full of long lush grass and empty horizons – never changes. We're in a forgotten field in Essex, where three female friends meet, talk, prod and tease each other. The long grass blows and the sky, thanks to Jack Knowles' emotive lighting, seems to throb with the promise of other, grander lives playing out somewhere far away. It might have felt a bit static were it not for Pickett's brilliant eye for detail and three captivating central performances. There's midwife Mariella who – rather refreshingly – hates her job and whom Tanya Reynolds imbues with a bristling, fragile competence. Siena Kelly is lovable and loathable as 'good girl' Anna, who longs for marriage and brims with anxiety, vulnerability and – as the plot darkens – something steely and ugly too. At the heart of things is Liv Hill's thunderbolt of a character, Jane. Practically half the scenes begin with her thrust up against a tree, as she dangles her sexuality in front of men like a horribly dangerous toy. She's selfish. Brave. Naive. Knowing. As news of Boleyn's awful fate reaches these three women, Hill's Jane seems to physically bolt and buck against the world – a wild horse frantic at being kept in captivity for far too long. Directed with wit and vigour by Lyndsey Turner, 1536 is both an easy and a deeply unsettling watch. The contemporary parallels sometimes feel slightly overplayed and, dare I say it, I could have seen more of the men. When they do appear, the scenes glimmer with menace and we are plunged into a world where even the slightest gesture – the refusal to eat a sweet, say – feels fraught with an all-too recognisable danger. At the Almeida, London, until 7 June
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?'
