In this electrifying debut play by Ava Pickett, the lives of three young women in Essex during Henry VIII’s reign – and by extension the lives of women today - are refracted through the lens of the King’s repudiation and execution of his once-beloved wife Anne Boleyn. It’s a bold, idiosyncratic and disturbingly funny work that slightly overplays its hand towards the end. Lyndsey Turner’s vibrant production features tremendous central performances from Siena Kelly, Tanya Reynolds and Liv Hill.
Pickett sets out her stall straight away, with Kelly’s comely servant Anna being rogered against a tree by a local landowner’s son. No sooner has he come and gone than Hill’s stolid, simple Jane arrives to tell of the Queen’s imprisonment. With Mariella (Reynolds), they boggle, scoff at, and digress from the momentous news, their manner and language a mix of modern and archaic, liberally laced with good old Anglo-Saxon F- and C-bombs.
Many themes are immediately in play. Patriarchy and the shifting tides of female friendship. The intersection of news and gossip. The demonization of female sexuality. The way we use royals as proxies for our own dramas. And the way society can be poisoned from the top down. All presented in a breezy, ebullient few minutes of banter.
There’s a nuanced approach to class, and the different currencies the women have in a man’s world. Anna’s beauty is coveted by men and envied by her friends, but her unfettered sexuality rebounds on them, and her. Jane’s family is wealthy enough to make her an advantageous match, but she’s not as sharp (or sexy) as her friends.
Mariella could have gone into service like Anna, but opted for her grandmother’s profession of midwifery, and ends up managing the pregnancy of the wealthier woman her former lover married. Her medical knowledge implicitly puts her on the witchy side when the chips are down.
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This is a world where a king can kill his wife after accusing her of sleeping with her brother and many others; where two men in Colchester recently burned their wives in the town square for adultery; where domestic violence and rape are normalized. “Has it always been like this?” Anna asks defeatedly at one point. If there were no men in the world, Mariella briefly muses, “I’d hear the birds more and look at the ground less”.
But for all the hardness of the underlying themes, the play is deliciously sly and airy. “Oh my God she’s washed her neck,” says Mariella, realising that Jane is courting. Hanging out with the wilful Anna, she says, is “like being friends with a f***in’ horse”.
The women note that “the French fashion” has fallen off since Boleyn was accused of sleeping with an uncool lute player, and it’s as if they’re scrolling through Mailonline. There are lovely digressions into hilarious misunderstandings and old anecdotes from their long friendship in a village where stimulation is rare.
Reynolds is excellent as the disappointed, watchful Mariella, while Hill makes Jane’s simplicity a study in pathos, without stinting the humour it generates. Kelly rises to the challenge of expressing a desirability so intoxicating for herself and others that it obliterates the boundaries of friendship. The two men in the cast, Adam Hugill and Angus Cooper, represent the implacable, inevitable order of things, but each gets a poetic or comic moment in the sun.
It unfolds on Max Jones’s set of thistles, grasses, and the aforementioned, much shagged-upon tree. Toward the end, Pickett strays into obviousness, and there’s a bizarre interlude where an enraged Anna pummels the earth to Steve Winwood’s Can’t Find My Way Home.
But these are minor quibbles. Pickett has writing credits on Brassic, Ten Pound Poms and The Great on TV. This script won her the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and it’s a terrific debut, with meaty roles for three of our finest young actresses, and plenty for an incisive director like Turner to get her teeth into. Bravo.
Almeida Theatre, to June 7; Almeida.co.uk
