1536, Almeida Theatre review - fast and furious portrayal of women in Henry VIII's England

Ava Pickett’s award-winning début play, 1536, is a foul-mouthed, furious, frenetically funny ride through the lives of three young women living in Henry VIII’s England in the year of Anne Boleyn’s execution.

It’s less Wolf Hall than a wolf howl of outrage against the double standards, toxic rumours and patriarchal injustices that plagued the lives of spirited women whether they were living in a palace or the remote countryside.

Lyndsey Turner’s fast-paced production opens with a vigorous sexual encounter between a man and woman against the stump of a convenient tree. From this, and the dialogue that ensues, it’s clear that both are equal power players in this relationship; Siena Kelly’s Anna (pictured above and below left) is as sexually confident as she’s intelligent while Adam Hugill’s Richard is intoxicated by her unconventional freedom.

But no sexual encounter happens in a vacuum, and the tentacles of society are waiting to ensnare both of them as surely as they have already ensnared Anne Boleyn. Though the earliest inklings of this are strictly comedic as Richard disappears to be replaced by Anna’s friends, Liv Hill’s bucolic simpleton, Jane, and Tanya Reynolds’ worldly wise Mariella (pictured below, at right).Pickett’s dialogue is shamelessly anachronistic – alongside the flurry of “fucks” there are references to “victimhood” and even “paperwork”. Not unlike Ella Hickson’s wonderful Swive (2019), a scalpel-sharp play about Elizabeth I and the treacherous world she lived in, this play wants to eradicate any conceptual distance between modern audiences and the women fighting for survival before their eyes.

The jokes come as rapidly as machine-gun fire in the earlier scenes. When Anna is asked how she would feel if the king were to die, she replies contemptuously that she’d be more affected by the death of John Pollen the local baker. The joke sounds simplistic, but it makes the point that in a time before proper roads, public transport, and a functioning post office, the life of a monarch could seem as remote as the existence of someone in Outer Siberia. Here, it’s only when Henry becomes the first monarch to arrest his wife that the machinations of the court seep into ordinary lives.

Though part of the fun is with the women’s initial detachment from the heart of English power (in the first scene Jane struggles to remember what the name of the King is), they themselves echo the situation playing out in London. The sexually confident Anna is of course a version of Anne Boleyn, while the more naïve, conventional Jane is an allusion to Henry’s subsequent wife, Jane Seymour. If there’s a link between Reynolds’ brilliant, heartfelt midwife Mariella and Catherine of Aragon, it’s more subtle but not impossible to spot – betrayed by the man she genuinely loves, her existence now depends on her successfully delivering healthy heirs for clients.  

Yet this is too good a play to trade extensively on echoes. Each character is a defiant three-dimensional character in her own right, and we feel the tug as their friendship is subsumed by the weight that conventional ideas of marriage impose on them. While they all feel the chill as news – first of Anne’s imprisonment in the Tower of London and then her “lovers’” trial – reaches them, all are trying to work out their own unsatisfactory equation between love, happiness and marriage.

Max Jones’ fantastic set – an eruption of wild grasses and that sexually convenient tree stump – thrusts us into the heart of rural England, while Jack Knowles’ superb light design provides a vivid spectrum of skies. Though both are doomed to become the villains of the piece, Hugill as Richard, and Angus Cooper as Mariella’s former love, William, manage to command enough empathy for us to feel the women’s bitterness when they are betrayed.

Strange though it may seem to say, this play could be stronger if it held back on the multiple disasters that befall the women at the end. We are so won over by their wit and dynamism in the first two thirds of the evening, the impact is rightly shocking when things start to fall apart. Yet as the tragedies multiply, the sensation is more like being doom-bludgeoned. Something that the Jacobeans of the next century would have recognised and no doubt applauded, but here it detracts from the enjoyable and disturbing complexity of what has come before.   

• 1536 is at the Almeida till June 7
• More theatre review on theartsdesk