Believe the hype. Ava Pickett’s debut play, which shows how Henry VIII’s repudiation of Anne Boleyn echoes down to three 16th-century Essex girls – and by extension to women today – is every bit as arresting and electrifying as it was at the Almeida last year. It’s transferred to the suitably intimate Ambassadors with the alchemically potent acting trio of Liv Hill, Siena Kelly and Tanya Reynolds intact, and with Margot Robbie on board as a producer.
Director Lyndsey Turner again expertly navigates the script’s blend of sweary modern and archaic language and its swings from laugh-out-loud humour to sudden, chilling horror. The play won Pickett – who had previous TV-writing credits on Brassic and The Great - the Standard’s 2025 Most Promising Playwright award along with almost every other comparable prize. She’s now co-writing Baz Luhrmann’s film about Joan of Arc and adapting 1536 for TV. But I urge you to see this story in the theatre where it’s thrillingly, coruscatingly alive.
It opens boldly with Kelly’s serving-girl Anna, the comely village wanton, being shagged up against a tree by local boy Richard before wiping the result on its trunk (and then, absent-mindedly, on her dress and hair). After he’s come and gone Hill’s stolid, simple Jane arrives to report on news filtering down from London that Henry has renounced his queen. With Reynolds’s Mariella, a deputy midwife, the three young women pick over and digress from the subject, distracted by gossip, old irritations and the recent discovery of a frog in a field.
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Pickett’s palette of themes is deftly blended in this first scene. We witness the shifting eddies of female friendship, the spidery spread of news and gossip, the way that a culture can be poisoned from the top down. This time round I was freshly struck by the way the women repeatedly stray from the momentous into the quotidian, either due to attention deficit or as a coping strategy.
Henry upended the world to marry Anne and now accuses her of adultery with multiple men including a lute player (“not even one of the good ones” among lowly musicians) and her own brother. Perhaps the ramifications – two women burned by their husbands for infidelity in a neighbouring village - are too big to face.
As the plot unfolds we judge how much and how little has changed since 1536. Anna is valued – and primarily values herself – for her beauty and sexual allure, but it’s Jane that Richard will marry, for her money. Landowner’s son William had a thing with Mariella, but she is now attending his pregnant wife, and her medical skill marks her out as a witchy object of suspicion. Moments of high comedy tip into a realisation that domestic violence is normalised and rape goes unpunished.
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Despite the brutal starkness of the underlying themes the dialogue is zingily bright and airy, with many beautiful phrases. Mariella says that knowing the unfettered Anna is like being “friends with a f***ing horse”, and muses that in a world without men she’d “hear the birds more and look at the ground less”. Jane is mocked by the others for talking of “turning over my leaves” before her wedding. Anna is more interested in the doings of the enamoured local baker than affairs at court: “When has the king ever given me a free loaf?”
Pickett has written three superb female roles, complete with subtly referenced backstories, and is repaid in full. Hill gives Jane a quiet dignity without stinting the comedy of her malapropisms and quaintness. Kelly convincingly embodies Anna’s dangerous sensuality, that she will eventually try to outrun. Reynolds is simply one of our subtlest, wittiest younger actors. The men, expertly played by Oliver Johnstone and George Kemp, are more than mere representatives of the patriarchy.
It’s punchily designed. The sky behind Max Jones’s set of sun-bleached thistles, grasses and the aforementioned shagging-tree reddens at moments of tension. Scenes end abruptly in neon-framed blackout. A Steve Winwood tune, bizarrely included at the Almeida, has been cut. The ending has been tightened but is still slightly baggy and obvious compared to what’s gone before. A minor flaw in a splendid piece of theatre.
