A fascinating feminist hybrid of EastEnders, Samuel Beckett and Wolf Hall, Ava Pickett’s 1536 is set in some marshland on the outskirts of an Essex village in – you guessed it – 1536, the year Anne Boleyn was executed.
Not that this is a by-the-numbers Tudor drama: the story focuses on three young women – Jane (Liv Hill), Anna (Sienna Kelly) and Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) – who never come within a sniff of the royal family. They see the monarchy as an important but distant constellation: in the opening scene Hill’s innocent Jane struggles for Henry VIII’s name beyond ‘the king’.
The engine of the play is Pickett’s superb dialogue and the sweary, lairy modern-language chats had by the women in the trampled bulrushes of Max Jones’s set.. Hill’s Jane is an adorable naif, Reynolds’s midwife Mariella is gawkily sarcastic. Each has their own complicated relationship with men in the village. But it’s Kelly’s Anna who is effectively the lead: beautiful and poor, she is deserted and scorned by the townsfolk, especially her wealthy lover Richard (Adam Hugill), who at the start of the play we discover is set to be married off to Jane.
It begins as a funny, even goofy, drama. Three Tudor women, effing and blinding away in an Essex field, using language that would make Danny Dyer blush is inherently funny, as is the fact that each of the early scenes begins with Anna and Richard going at it hammer and tongs in the reeds. But things start to curdle: aside from various village tensions galvanised by Liv’s imminent marriage, news arrives from London that Henry has arrested his queen Anne Boleyn and accused her of treasonous adultery. The news does not exist in a vacuum: the men of Essex start taking cues from their king, with word reaching the village of adulterous local wives executed by their vengeful husbands.
What it boils down to is this: in 1536, men enjoyed almost total domination over women, and they began to treat them palpably worse as news arrived of Henry’s treatment of Anne, their worst instincts empowered. Of course Pickett’s drama is about the treatment of women in Early Modern England. But really it’s about power dynamics between men and women full stop, and the role that coercion and threats of violence play in men’s historical social dominance.
The play is never so gauche as to spell this out, but it’s not hard to see Henry’s role as analogous to a modern toxic male influencer, spreading poison from a distance. We tend to think of the English Reformation and Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon as enormously consequential and killing Anne as just a dick move that was the preserve of a capricious monarch. But Pickett posits Anne’s killing as at least as influential in its day as the break with Rome. Powerless in most respects, it’s no wonder Anna relishes the limited power her beauty brings her, able to control men by their dicks, if only in short bursts.
For well over an hour Lyndsey Turner’s production is tremendous, a jokily anachronistic affair that curdles and darkens magnificently as we come to understand the women’s lives and what Pickett is trying to say about the unchanging nature of socialism power dynamics. The core cast of Hill, Kelly and Reynolds are superb: funny, impassioned and despairing, edging towards turning on each other as their options run out.
It’s too long: it suffers from that Return of the King thing where each of the last four or so scenes feel like they could have been the final one, which saps its momentum. But this is a trivial complaint: 1536 is a droll and perceptive period piece that’s also a searing and unsettling contemporary feminist drama. I suspect that like the Almeida’s recent smash The Years, women may identify with 1536 a little more strongly than men – it’s ultimately about the female experience, not the male one, who don’t come out in a great light. But we should all listen.
