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A year after it was first seen at the Almeida, Ava Pickett’s remarkable debut play already has an adaptation into a BBC series in the works. Now, with Barbie star Margot Robbie on board as a producer, the production transfers to the West End. Set in May 1536, the month of Anne Boleyn’s arrest, trial and execution, it’s a vision of Tudor England from the vantage point of lowly but lively Essex folk: a trio of young female friends. It moves apace from some of the freshest, funniest writing around to some of the most devastating, with nuanced performances to match.
Set amid high grasses, a boldly conceived first scene finds the heroine, Siena Kelly’s rivetingly insouciant Anna, with her back to a tree trunk, vigorously having it off with a chap (Oliver Johnstone’s ardent Richard) whose hose are round his ankles. With barely a word spoken – he gives her a bracelet as a token of his devotion – this announces a rustic world of impulse and groping instinct, in which influence can be wielded by beautiful women. Like Boleyn, Anna captivates powerful men; but also like Boleyn, she learns how quickly patriarchal authority can turn vicious.
Too often, historical drama adopts a strained register, creaking beneath an excess of exposition and, worse, saddled with olde worlde speak. Pickett’s inspired approach is instead to make these Essex lasses sound garrulously, often swearily, contemporary while maximising the dramatic force of their period ignorance. Scoffing disbelief greets the gossip about what’s afoot far away at court.
There are belly laughs, especially at the expense of the credulous youngest, Liv Hill’s Jane (betrothed to Richard). But her conformist mindset comes to seem more tactically astute than Anna’s rebel spirit as the local men start to take their brutish cue from kingly despotism and the atmosphere darkens.
Completing the cast are Tanya Reynolds as Mariella, a midwife, and George Kemp as William, another powerful married man (all forced charm) with whom she is embroiled. From a quizzical sideline, Mariella comes to stand at the bloody centre of a denouement marked by dissent, death and a gathering storm of communal violence.
Lyndsey Turner’s direction manages each beat of the action impeccably, assisted by a superb design, lighting included. The building momentum and deepening sophistication are perfectly judged, and the accusatory message about women’s constrained lives, then and now, emerges via consummate craft. The last breathless line of the play is “Run!”. Indeed: run to catch it now.