What happens when the most powerful man in England discards his wife, and the shockwaves ripple outward into the lives of ordinary women? That is the question at the heart of 1536, a play that takes one of history's most infamous headlines and does something genuinely thrilling with it. Rather than retelling the story of Anne Boleyn's arrest for treason, this production shifts its gaze entirely, landing on three women in rural Essex whose lives are quietly, then violently, reshaped by a scandal happening miles away at court.
The result is one of the sharpest, funniest and most unsettling pieces of new writing currently on the London stage. It is a play that understands misogyny not as a single dramatic act of cruelty, but as an atmosphere: something that seeps through society like damp through plaster, rotting everything it touches from the inside out.
A Tudor Scandal Seen From the Ground Up
The setup is deceptively simple. Three women, Anna, Jane and Mariella, exist in a world where the arrest of Anne Boleyn is not a political earthquake but a piece of gossip, a cautionary tale, something to be debated over chores and daily life. The king never appears on stage, yet his presence saturates every scene. His power, his desires and his judgements hang over these women like a weather system they cannot escape.
The naming of two characters as Anna and Jane is entirely deliberate, mirroring the Tudor court's own cycle of women elevated and then destroyed. Writer Pickett uses this parallel not as a heavy-handed metaphor but as a quietly devastating structural choice. The women on stage are living out patterns that stretch backward and forward through centuries, and the play trusts its audience to recognise that without spelling it out.
What makes the writing so effective is its understanding of how public scandal becomes private reality. The news of Boleyn's arrest does not just remain a topic of conversation. It actively changes how the women in this community are treated, how they treat each other, and how the men around them feel emboldened to behave. The local rumour economy becomes a vehicle for control, and watching it unfold is both gripping and deeply uncomfortable.
The Madonna-Whore Trap: No Way Out
Sienna Kelly's performance as Anna is the production's most electrifying element. At the start, Anna appears to understand the game being played. Men desire her, and she treats that desire as a form of currency, a source of power in a world that offers her precious few alternatives. Scene after scene opens with her and Richard (Jane's fiancé) in various states of passionate entanglement, their affair charged with something that feels dangerously close to freedom.
But the play is too intelligent to let that stand. Slowly, methodically, it reveals the trap. Men adore Anna when she is exciting, unattainable, the ultimate fantasy. The moment male ego enters the picture, once questions of ownership, respectability and humiliation come into play, the language shifts entirely. Suddenly she is "unwomanly." She becomes a whore. The relationship between Anna and Richard, mirroring that of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn herself, transforms from a love affair into a power struggle, a dangerous game of chess where only one player knows the rules can change at any moment.
Meanwhile, Liv Hill delivers a brilliant turn as Jane, who attempts the opposite strategy. She pursues goodness, obedience, softness, prayer: the version of womanhood that men publicly approve of rather than privately desire. The devastating irony, of course, is that this route offers no more safety than Anna's. The play circles the same brutal question relentlessly: what do men actually want from women? Beauty? Purity? Submission? Excitement? Loyalty? Silence? The answer, depressingly, appears to be all of these things simultaneously, an impossible standard designed to ensure that every woman can eventually be found guilty of something.
Genuinely, Gloriously Funny
What prevents 1536 from becoming an unbearably bleak experience is the sheer force of its comedy. This is not a play that delivers polite, restrained theatre chuckles. It is properly biting, gossipy, occasionally filthy and frequently hilarious. There is something wonderfully chaotic about watching these Tudor women argue, flirt, swear and spiral in exchanges that feel less like a period drama and more like a night out in Essex that has gone spectacularly off the rails.
At times, the energy on stage recalls a collision between a reality TV confessional and a historical epic, as though someone had dropped the cast of a modern docusoap into the world of a Hilary Mantel novel after several glasses of wine. That description might sound flippant, but the tonal balance is precisely what makes the production work. The laughter draws you in. The recognition keeps you there. And then the gut punches land all the harder because you were not braced for them.
The ensemble's comic timing is outstanding, and the production understands that humour and horror are not opposites. They are neighbours, and the door between them is always open.
500 Years and Nothing Has Changed
The play's most powerful achievement is how effortlessly it collapses the distance between 1536 and the present day. Pickett's writing draws a clear, unflinching line from the court of Henry VIII through to modern culture, tracing the same patterns of male entitlement across five centuries. The cycle is always the same: idealise the woman, crave her validation, feel entitled to possess her, reward those who fit the fantasy, punish or destroy those who do not.
The contemporary resonance is not subtext. It is the entire point. The play invites its audience to consider how these same dynamics play out in tabloid culture, in social media, in relationships, in every space where women are still judged, desired and controlled according to rules they did not write and cannot win by. The specifics change. The underlying logic does not.
This is what elevates 1536 beyond a clever historical parallel. It is not simply saying "look, things were bad for women in Tudor England." It is saying "look at the operating system, and notice that it is still running." That message lands with a force that stays with you long after you leave the theatre.
Performances That Demand Attention
The cast is uniformly excellent. Sienna Kelly brings a magnetic, layered quality to Anna that makes her both sympathetic and complicated. She captures the specific tragedy of a woman who believes she has found a way to game a system that was designed to be ungameable. Liv Hill's Jane is equally compelling, her quiet faith and determination creating a character who is no less brave for choosing compliance as her survival strategy. The supporting performances are strong throughout, with each actor finding genuine specificity in their role.
The direction keeps the pace tight and the transitions sharp, allowing the comedy and the cruelty to sit alongside each other without one undermining the other. The staging is economical but effective, using the rural Essex setting to create a sense of isolation that amplifies the claustrophobia of the women's circumstances. There is nowhere to hide in this community, and the production makes you feel that in every scene.
Should You Book?
Absolutely. 1536 is the kind of theatre that justifies the medium's existence: a play that is simultaneously entertaining and enraging, that makes you laugh out loud before pulling the rug out from under you with devastating precision. It is smart, furious, beautifully performed and frighteningly relevant. If you care about new writing, about women's stories, or simply about spending an evening in the theatre that will genuinely make you think, this should be at the top of your list.
The production is a reminder that some of the most exciting work in London theatre right now is not happening in the biggest rooms with the biggest budgets. It is happening in spaces where writers are willing to take a well-known story and ask a completely different question about it.
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Susan Novak has a lifelong passion for theatre. With a degree in English, she brings a deep appreciation for storytelling and drama to her writing. She also loves reading and poetry. When not attending shows, Susan enjoys exploring new work and sharing her enthusiasm for the performing arts, aiming to inspire others to experience the magic of theatre.
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