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There's not a single Shakespeare play named after a woman leader – but Tristan Bernays' bloody, messy new drama has come roaring into the void. It fills the Globe with battling Celts that abseil down the theatre's wooden walls. Subtle it ain't, but it's a huge amount of fun.
Gina McKee is quietly, compellingly vengeful as the Boudica, Queen of the Iceni, who's robbed of her palace and lands by dastardly Romans after her husband's death. So together with her two daughters, she rallies all the other Ancient Briton tribes she can muster to take the invaders down for good.
The leaders of the different tribes are neatly characterised: Cunobeline (Forbes Masson) is a wise, mild-mannered Scot, Badvoc (Abraham Popoola) is a wild, woad-wearing Rambo. At first Bernays' script seems to be making a smart point about colonialism, showing how the effete Romans cast these Britons as hairy, animalistic wretches to justify their rule.
In the second act, things hot up (abseiling Celts!) but the overarching message of the play cools down. Boudica is cursed with a thoroughly insipid daughter, Alonna (Joan Iyiola), who becomes the moral mouthpiece of the show with a sappy 'Can't Brits and Romans just get on'-type speech. It feels like a clear message for Brexit-era Britain. But it's one that ignores the fact that this story's civilised continental types aren't just here to live and work, they're bent on colonising and crushing a whole nation.
Bernays' script is written in tangled blank verse, with inverted phrases that hamper its attempts to explore these complexities. Instead, the play is driven by explication-heavy passages of narrative, peppered with the odd sweary aside to make sure we're still listening. She might be at the throbbing heart of this play, but Boudica feels weirdly underwritten, too: her feelings are left inscrutable as her tribe is slaughtered, one by one.
Witty covers of pop songs (a bit of a signature of Emma Rice's reign at the Globe), fight scenes and buckets of blood mean that 'Boudica' is a pacy, fun watch that'll thrill 'Game of Thrones' fans. But it's not quite the history-making feminist epic this Iceni queen deserves.