Review: 1536, Almeida Theatre

Rumours are flying, people are f-ing, and the queen’s been taken to the tower. Ava Pickett’s debut play 1536 tears through a story of female sexuality and male violence, bringing a distinctly twenty-first century language and sensibility to the era of Anne Boleyn.

All taking part in the same forest clearing, in the same village in Essex, in the same summer, 1536 follows three girls. Anna (Siena Kelly) is feisty and outspoken, with a growing reputation for ‘having her way’ with the men of the town. Jane (Liv Hill), meanwhile, is her opposite, more concerned with being a good girl and pleasing her father. Their trio is completed by Mariella (Tanya Reynolds), a down-to-earth midwife who balances them out. And then there’s the men. As news reaches the village that the king has had his own wife arrested for promiscuity, and may even have her killed, power shifts hands and it’s every woman for herself.

Ava Pickett’s 1536 is a show full of f**king - both in action and in words. The show begins with the sound of heavy breathing from a couple pressed up against a tree, while the girls throw a ‘f**k’, ‘f**king’, or ‘f**ked’ into almost every sentence. But this is no softly lit, corseted Bridgerton affair. The play is laced with tension and roughness, coarse and bare in both language and movement. Anna spends much of her time hoiking her dress up around her hips as she squats to sit, uncaringly unladylike. The girls snap at each other like the squabbling teens they essentially are, teasing and jibing tenderly but with an ever-present undercurrent of bitterness. 

Director Lyndsey Turner’s deceptively simple blocking allows for the performers’ physicality to take the lead, which it does to great success. All three of the leads give excellent performances, building a tense, ever-shifting dynamic. Liv Hill as Jane finds the perfect level of innocence and naivety, unafraid to dig deep into her character’s fear and ferocity when needed. Sex Education star Tanya Reynolds gives the most grounded performance, starting off very understated before eventually becoming heartbreaking. Her deadpan line deliveries also earn some of the show’s biggest laughs.

The standout performance, though, comes from Siena Kelly (Black Mirror) as Anna, who oozes charisma and sass, while also portraying a girl driven by insecurity and, eventually, desperation. She renders this morally complex character someone to root for, bringing earnestness and complexity to the role. 

Designer Max Jones creates a sparse, dry clearing as the story’s base, which feels pleasingly at odds with the bright white frame surrounding the stage – a satisfying parallel to the script’s combination of old and new. The action unfolds in front of a gradually evolving sky background, helping to alter the tone. This is echoed in Jack Knowles’ atmospheric lighting, and Tingying Dong’s ominous sound design, which consists mostly of a low humming, overlaid with moans, drums, and sighs. 

Pickett marks herself as a skilled writer, with perfectly pitched pacing and controlled tone: this is the kind of objectively engaging, well-written play the Almeida is known for. More interesting, though, is the lens through which she examines the themes of misogyny and sexual freedom.  The girls all speak with contemporary Essex accents and modern day cadences, with the gossip and bickering giving some scenes a soap-like quality. The execution of Anne Boleyn plays in parallel to the events of the girls’ own lives, like celebrity rumour, as word of the king’s ruthlessness gives the men of the village new audacity. History, we learn, repeats itself.

The only issue with 1536, then, is that the play repeats itself too. Digging under the surface, it’s tricky to find much that goes beyond men are dangerous, they have always been dangerous, they always will be. While true and timely, the shades of nuance could do with expansion: the show is most interesting when it looks at the impacts of gossip and celebrity, and the tensions of women turning on one another.

Revisiting long-standing feminist ideas, the plot is sometimes rendered predictable by its familiarity. This hollowness feels particularly prescient in conversation with the Almeida’s recent production of Otherland, another play about womanhood and misogyny, but one that finds the radicality, nuance, and creativity 1536 occasionally lacks. 

While it may feel a little hollow at its centre, it would be hard to argue that 1536 is anything other than a superbly well-written, well-acted piece of theatre, marking Pickett as one to watch. It also joins a chorus of recent productions centering the dangers of girlhood: from Playfight at Soho Theatre to the Globe’s new staging of The Crucible, these are themes that echo across the ages.

1536 runs at the Almeida Theatre until 7 June.