FringeReview UK 2025

1536

Almeida Theatre

Genre: Costume, Drama, Feminist Theatre, Historical, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Almeida Theatre, Islington

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

With expletives in stage-directions you could predict it’s not just sex against a tree that’s headlong as Ava Pickett’s stage debut 1536 opens. The language itself, sweary, demotic, furious impels both characters and plot. 1536 premieres at the Almeida directed by Lyndsey Turner till June 7^th. It’s sold out but it’s a play many will queue returns for. For those who know it, any play winning the women’s U.S.-based Susan Smith Blackburn prize is worth pursuing. Pickett absolutely deserves to be in such company.

Pickett’s known for TV work but here hits the stage running in this straight-through-two-hour scorch that starts rogering and ends raging. The date immediately tells us it’s going ill for Queen Anne Boleyn, and the ultimate trickle-down  effect (for once accurately) is toxic male permission. ”Kings don’t kill their wives… it just doesn’t happen” says Anna (Siena Kelly), the liberated one of a trio of young women: whose names and characters wittily echo Henry VIII’s first three queens. It’s to a degree Kelly’s play but the women in particular are sharply-drawn, each a catalyst for the other. Their present-day Essex speech zig-zags, shorts, burns and explodes in laughter.

Max Jones’s set is a lovingly detailed bog, moodily lit by Jack Knowles, usually known for spectral lighting. Here he adopts skies chiming with mood and ominous tenebrae. The bog’s the childhood meeting-place of the trio since girlhood, and no sooner has Richard (Adam Hugill) come, gifted a turquoise and gone, than Jane (Liv Hill), to whom he’s been betrothed in a parental merger, arrives with news that Anne’s been arrested for treacherous adultery.

Is that even a thing? But as court rumour keeps trickling, the men’s behaviour subtly –in one case unsubtly – alters. The king as influencer doesn’t need to be spelt out. Though when you think a period gleefully took its cue from a king’s jolly-rogering behaviour, like Charles II, it’s axiomatic that Henry VIII’s savage swiving is answered. Near Colchester two women are dragged out by their husbands and burned for adultery. “That’s Colchester” Anna protests.

It’s not just Anna’s sexual power – something, like Anne Boleyn, she explicitly delights in – that feels compromised. Kelly scorches through Anna’s mix of quick-witted sense and occasionally naivety. She’s smarter than simpler Jane but not as wise as Mariella, a year he junior, inured to watching. Some characters grow.  The strength of Hill’s younger Jane, whose goofiness and pratfall questions litter the first half, is how Hill proves how Jane gnarls into a mind, not of her own, but separate. A mind broken into the status quo, is thought and battered by others, but can still judge, and just occasionally break out.

Intelligent, cautious, heartbroken Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) works as midwife. Eleanor née Updale, local grandees is nearing birth, and depends on her skills. It’s a bitter conduct for Mariella, since Eleanor married the man she loved: William (Angus Cooper), and feelings are still mutual. Unlike Anna though, Mariella, in Reynolds’ exquisite moments of pain, restraint and truth-telling, won’t dwell on it.

Cooper’s William is for much of the play a man nuanced with regret, bowed by forces heavier than himself. A tender scene between him and Reynolds is the delicate, unspoken heart of 1536. Love, not just lust, nor enforced marriage, flickers between them. In May 1536 though, anything can go wrong. Hugill’s Richard far more gleefully embraces the times: his mix of lust, scorn and increasing threats to Anna ratchet up, skewed by his own lust, and Ana’s desire to break off. He marries Jane, whom he scorns in a different way. Reports reach Anna.

Yet one of this play’s strengths is its undermining. Dangers emerge unexpectedly: the shifting alliances of the women are tested, as Jane long-turned is forced to rexamine her role. Is it enough? But their friendship’s tested to the limit. The ending’s quite electrifying.

Inevitably, chances to develop the two men are limited; not to pull focus on the women they never appear together. 1536 impresses in suddenlys, but also in the depth of the three women’s characters. Demotic Essex forks a lightning-rod to the audience. You wonder if Anna, to an extent inured to the times, would seem quite so reckless, but the outfall is anything but predictable. A male-dominated world taking its cue from royal misogyny is both plausible and seeing 1536, you wonder why no-one’s thought of it before. A stunning must-see debut.

Lighting Design Concept Collaborator Tim Lutkin, Composer and Arranger Will Stuart, Movement and Intimacy Director Anna Morrissey, Casting Director Amy Ball CDG, Fight Director Sam Lyon-Behan, Dialect Coach Edda Sharpe, Costume Supervisor Sabia Smith, Assistant Director Taiwo Ava Oyebola, Almeida Makers Design Placement Bolu Dairo

Published May 14, 2025May 14, 2025 by Simon Jenner