Review: 1536 – Ambassadors Theatre

Henry VIII got through six wives, triggered a religious reformation, and still takes up more than his fair share of history curricula. The least he could do was stay offstage, and in Ava Pickett’s electrifying West End debut, that’s exactly where he stays, radiating menace from a distance while three women in an Essex field work out what his latest marital catastrophe means for the rest of womankind. The answer, which Pickett lets accumulate slowly and then drops on you like a stone, is: everything. So writes Franco Milazzo for theQR.co.uk…

Ava Pickett’s 1536 Brings Tudor Politics to the Ambassadors Theatre

The year is 1536. Anne Boleyn has been arrested, and the rumours are travelling on foot from London to Essex, where Anna (Siena Kelly), Jane (Liv Hill) and Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) are processing what the queen’s predicament means for women of their station. Pickett gives each enough room to breathe and plenty in common. Mariella is apprenticed as a midwife and has the misfortune of tending to the pregnant wife of a man she’s still in love with, a situation that would test the professional detachment of a saint.

The sensible Jane walks the straight and narrow, awaiting the husband her father is arranging. Anna, whom we meet joyfully having sex up against a tree, struggles to fit into a world that has no language for a woman who refuses to defer, though the damage that refusal costs her is what the second half of the play is really about.

Henry VIII got through six wives, triggered a religious reformation, and still takes up more than his fair share of history curricula. The least he could do was stay offstage, and in Ava Pickett’s electrifying West End debut, that’s exactly where he stays…

Her lover Richard (Oliver Johnstone, queasily good) and Mariella’s feckless former lover William (George Kemp) complete the male roster: both men are drawn with enough dimension to be properly depressing rather than merely cartoonish.

Rather than leaning on the language of the era, the dialogue is grounded in earthy modern vernacular (a critic’s way of saying: expect a lot of swearing). Between Pickett’s faultless ear for dialogue and director Lyndsey Turner’s precise pacing, the anachronism never feels like a gimmick. These Tudor women sound the way you suspect women have always talked when men weren’t listening, and the casual misogyny woven into their banter — women policing each other with the same instruments used against them — lands with a contemporary sting that no amount of period costume could neutralise.

Lyndsey Turner Directs a Masterclass in Tension

Having Turner at the wheel is one of the production’s greatest assets. She knows when to coast languorously through the Essex summer as the women natter and gossip, when to rev the dramatic engine, and when to slam the brakes for the heart-in-mouth moments. That balance is genuinely hard to maintain when your set is a single field and your cast is lean, but Turner holds her nerve right to the final cliffhanger. Nobody who saw her production of Chimerica, also an Almeida-to-West-End transfer and also a play about how power at the top licenses cruelty at the bottom, will be surprised that she navigates this particular current so cleanly.

**Siena Kelly – 1536 Production Images – West End – Photo by Helen Murray**

Max Jones’s set, a marshy field with a tree in the foreground that has watched women like these live out the same grinding patterns across centuries, captures the timeless, static nature of their lives with quiet intelligence. It’s Jack Knowles’s lighting and Tingying Dong’s sound that do the heavy lifting when danger enters: the air cools, the light shifts towards something rawer, and the women’s laughter begins to sound different. All three work their magic in subtle but vital ways.

Having Turner at the wheel is one of the production’s greatest assets. She knows when to coast languorously through the Essex summer as the women natter and gossip, when to rev the dramatic engine, and when to slam the brakes for the heart-in-mouth moments.

Thematically, 1536 is a grown-up cousin to Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain, which rooted its gender politics in the #MeToo era via Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Pickett reaches back further, to Boleyn’s execution, but the mechanism is identical: a historical lens held up to ask how much has actually changed. The answer both playwrights arrive at is grim and funny in roughly equal measure, which is quite a trick if you can manage it. Pickett manages it.

The script has apparently been significantly revised since Margot Robbie came on board as producer, and will likely be revised again when the planned BBC adaptation reaches the screen. From the cosy Almeida to the still-intimate Ambassadors, 1536 has lost none of its effect. It is furious and funny and precisely right about the world. Pickett is 31 years old, from Clacton-on-Sea, and is currently co-writing a Baz Luhrmann film. The theatre world should commission her next play before Hollywood makes her an offer she can’t refuse.

Featured Image: Tanya Reynolds and Siena Kelly – 1536 Production Images – West End – Photo by Helen Murray