ajhlovestheatre

1536 

by Ava Pickett

directed by Lyndsey Turner 

Almeida Theatre, London – until 7 June 2025

running time: 1 hour 50 minutes, no interval 

https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/1536-play/

“Has it always been like this? Will it always be like this?” asks Siena Kelly’s disillusioned Anna, a sixteenth century young woman whose freedom and intelligence is under fire in a world controlled by self-serving men in this historical comedy drama that speaks to the present day with a rare urgency.

Female rage when harnessed and honed is one of the most potent forces on earth. There’s a lot of female rage in Ava Pickett’s incandescent debut play, set in Tudor England but feeling bang up to date: there’s also a lot of passion, raucous humour and electrifying drama, plus some of the spiciest, most heartfelt dialogue written for theatre in quite some time. 

1536 was the year Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, was beheaded (allegedly for adultery although in retrospect the claims seem spurious) and Pickett has imagined a trio of young women from rural 16th century Essex fascinated by, and commenting on, a Royal crisis that, on the surface, would only appear to have a tangential effect on their day-to-day lives. As with the narrative of history itself, the information these women receive is controlled by men, with the result that it takes a tremendous leap of faith and imagination for them to think outside the male-centric box they’ve been locked into. One of them (Kelly’s free-thinking, impassioned Anna) manages it successfully, the other two…not so much. 

One of the many wondrous things about Pickett’s script is that these characters never sound like mouthpieces. Far from it, these are recognisable flesh-and-blood humans who switch allegiances, keep secrets and have each others backs even when it’s actively painful to do so. The acutely observed, truthful performances of Kelly, Liv Hill and Tanya Reynolds – surely three of this country’s most brilliant young actresses – help immeasurably of course, but the writing is cracking. It never tips over into worthiness, and it’s frequently a hell of a lot of fun. The nearest this gets to cliché is that this central trio initially sound like archetypal ‘Essex girls’, which is quite deliberate and delicious.

Pickett’s dialogue is salty, stroppy, contemporary, and at first it seems that the point of 1536 is that witty, smart women were just as present in times gone by but that their lives were straitjacketed and stifled by the patriarchy. The women’s observations on the plight of Anne Boleyn, reports from London being drip-fed through periodically, also feel like a comment on the way news and scandal are shaped by biased mass media in the modern age. It turns out though that Pickett is on about something far deeper and more dramatic but it’s not fair to give away too much as the play becomes proper edge-of-your-seat stuff. 

Suffice it to say that the broken hearted love between Tanya Reynolds’s tartly funny, warmly independent midwife and a local landowner (Angus Cooper, multi-layered and compelling) is handled with real sensitivity. Hot button topics such as rape and domestic violence are introduced but it always feels entirely organic. Liv Hill as the most impressionable and (on the surface at least) vulnerable of the three women finds pathos in her naivety but also a volcanic anger and gut-wrenching pain as her far-from-happy domestic circumstances implode. When she screams at the more worldly wise, sexually confident Anna “a man looks at you, and you call it fucking power” it’s like a cry of agony but it’s also terrifying as one realises the chasm widening between these former friends. Adam Hugill is strong but subtle as a male presence who proves toxic to these women but is ultimately just as lost in his own way. There’s not a single false note in any of the acting. 

Lyndsey Turner’s production is basically flawless. It’s entirely, engagingly naturalistic, until it isn’t. The lighting by Jack Knowles conveys rural exteriors but then suddenly bathes Max Jones’s attractively bucolic set – all grass and flower bushels and a picturesque tree – in acidic yellow or deep sanguine red. It never feels flashy though, every creative working fully in service of the text. There’s even a section that veers into interpretive dance, furious and abandoned, to a howling vocal by Maimuna Memon (powerful compositon by Will Stuart), and used in a similar vein to that of the current Broadway smash hit, John Proctor Is The Villain, to which 1536 bears more than a passing resemblance. When the piece turns violent, it’s meaty not melodramatic, and has the tragic tang of inevitability.

The switch from off-the-cuff humour and foul-mouthed charm to despair and righteous anger is seamlessly done. So much is at stake here, and we feel it and, if we’re paying attention, are profoundly affected by it. There’s a line near the very end which encapsulates so much of what 1536 is about: as one of her best friends vows, yet again, to stifle her own desires and happiness to get by in a brutalised, male dominated world and to “be good”, Anna asks, in rage and frustration, “how you can be good when they keep changing the definition of what that is?”

Well, 1536 certainly gets to the heart of what a good play is. The Almeida run is, unsurprisingly, sold out already but do whatever you can to get a return or cancellation. Better still, let’s start a petition for a West End transfer. This is (literally) bloody marvellous.