Almeida Theatre

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...

Having made her name by working through Tennessee Williams’s core plays, the Almeida’s Rebecca Frecknall now seems to be lining up the rest of the mid-twentieth century American canon. She’s already directed Cabaret and has Miller’s Death of a Salesman booked in at the National Theatre in a couple of years; and now she tries her hand at Eugene O’Neill. A Moon for the Misbegotten is O’Neill’s final play, that serves as a sequel to his great autobiographical work Long Day’s Journey Into Night (although somwhat confusingly the author famously didn’t allow the first play to be produced in his lifetime). Less bleak than the first work, A Moon… is set on an isolated, crumbing Connecticut farm and follows a group of characters who live or visit the place. Ruth Wilson will play Josie Hogan, the quick tongued daughter of tenant farmer Phil Hogan; Michael Shannon will play their grieving, alcoholic landlord James Tyrone Jr, aka an older version of Jamie Tyrone from Long Day’s Journey. Shannon actually played the role in a 2016 Broadway production of Long Day’s Journey, meaning this will potentially serve as a sequel for him, if not for many audience members.