14-05-2025
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?'
