1536

by Ava Pickett

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 4 June 2025

With characters named Anna and Jane, and with the year of Ann Boleyn's downfall and execution as its title, one might have expected Ava Pickett's play 1536 (here expertly directed by Lyndsey Turner) to be yet another work appealing to our apparently inexhaustible fascination with Tudor history. But Anna (Siena Kelly) and Jane (Liv Hill) and their friend Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) are young women in a village in Essex, a place which considers Colchester, let alone London, to be too far away to provide anything except distant and late-arriving news. What they hear about the disgraced queen profoundly disturbs them, but they are at the same time aware that more may well have happened in the time it has taken for the news to reach them; that what sounds like an impossible rift in the right way of the world may well have already been resolved.

In the meantime Anna pursues her wanton ways, for the most part blithely unaware that her reputation is being tarnished, while Jane prepares to follow her father's bidding into an arranged marriage with Richard (Adam Hugill) - the man currently infatuated with Anna. Mariella, slowly assuaging her own heartbreak over William (Angus Cooper) who has also married for social advantage in the village, is apprenticed to the midwife and hopes her work will see her through, even though she does not like it.

The menfolk are occasional presences in what is a tense but cunningly localised drama of conflicting desires and social oppression. Anna appears to be in control of her life, and she often treats the bland and none-too-bright Jane with amused contempt even though they are supposed to be firm friends. Jane herself, seeking utterly naive at first, shows an unpleasantly ruthless streak under pressure, as the mild-mannered so often do. Mariella is less amenable to this treatment and more aware of the danger Anna is courting; their personalities and attitudes make for a powerful microcosm of late medieval society as it impinged on womenfolk, while the news of the catastrophe enveloping Queen Ann acts as a counterpoint to the development of these women's "small" and (of course) undocumented lives.

The action takes place in the fields outside the village. The set, designed by Max Jones, is a field of wild grasses, very suitable for the illicit assignations Anna so enjoys, and for conducting female gossip away from the unwelcome attentions of fathers and husbands (until the men come looking for the women). Since the Almeida has no proscenium, the set is visible from the moment one enters the auditorium, and it is framed at the front by a huge rectangle of thin neon light, almost like the border of a giant cinema screen. The wildness of the Essex countryside immediately destroys any expectation that this is going to be a play about court life, and the modern earthiness of the language only reinforces the point that we are dealing with articulate but essentially unlettered folk. But, as news percolates that the queen has been executed, local events put the three friends in danger: their prospects for surviving in a relentlessly patriarchal world are completely uncertain. The resonances with the modern world are all too clear: who will be believed? Is it safer to strike out or to bow to one's fate?

Aristocrats

by Brian Friel

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 30 August 2018

Lyndsey Turner directs this revival of Brian Friel's 1979 play about the decaying O'Donnell family, unusually Roman Catholic denizens of a 'Big House' in Ballybeg, County Donegal (most 'Big Houses' belonged to Anglo Protestants).

The house has seen better times - repairs are outstanding and there is virtually no money to keep it going - and the family in the 1970s is not what it was either, having descended from Chief Justice to sausage factory worker in four generations. The senescent father (James Laurenson), principally present to us through his rambling diatribes overheard through a baby monitor, still holds sway over Judith (Eileen Walsh), the daughter dutifully caring for him, and can still strike terror into is wayward son Casimir (David Dawson) when he is visiting from Hamburg, but he seems to have less effect on Alice (Elaine Cassidy) visiting with her husband Eamon (Emmet Kirwan) from London, and the youngest daughter Claire (Aisling Loftus) still living at home but about to be married.

The family has in fact gathered for Claire's wedding, but Tom Hoffnung (Paul Higgins), an American academic, is also ferreting around the house and taking notes about family anecdotes as part of a research project. The situation is thus ripe both for peculiar revelations and for some sociological theorising and analysis, and at times both seem a little forced. However, it is not so much that there are skeletons in the closet (as might be expected from the dramatic set-up), but rather that the siblings - apart perhaps from the determinedly practical Judith - are deeply strange people: Alice losing herself to drink because her marriage has soured, Claire veering between the highs and lows of manic depression, and Casimir holding himself together with inexhaustible nervous energy. When Eamon remarks to Tom that the family half believe that Casimir's German wife and three boys are a figment of his imagination we are left forever unsure of how to take anything that Casimir says, and his palpable shock when Tom presents him with incontrovertible evidence that one of his family memories is impossible only strengthens the impression that he is lost in daydreams.

Though there are weirdly comic moments, much of what we see instils an atmosphere of debility and even despair; the similarity to Chekhovian ennui is increasingly obvious, reinforced by the country house setting, the faded gentility of the family, and the eventual collapse of the means to keep the whole enterprise going. But the style of this particular production makes it hard to grasp the tone of the piece, with the result that it takes more time than it should to settle into the world we are witnessing. Rather than creating a realistic setting, Turner and designer Es Devlin have designed an almost featureless pale pastel green acting space with a model of a house standing in for the real thing, and stage directions at the beginning of each act read out to set the scene. Where such a model was a powerful symbol in The Inheritance here it looks a little contrived, and the constant presence of the cast hovering in the background when not required to be on stage, so masterfully effective in Matthew Lopez's play, here makes the action more difficult to follow.

This is a pity, because the individual performances are often very good, and David Dawson in particular is brilliant as Casimir; and the concluding mixture of melancholy and hope is quietly affecting.

The Treatment

by Martin Crimp

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 10 May 2017

Lyndsey Turner directs this revival of Martin Crimp's 1993 play, with Aisling Loftus as Anne, Indira Varma as Jennifer and Julian Ovenden as Andrew, supported by Matthew Needham as Simon, Ellora Torchia as Nicky, Ian Gelder as Clifford and Gary Beadle as John and a couple of dozen mostly silent extras. The sets are designed by Giles Cad;e and lit by Neil Austin.

This is a really disturbing play, not least because it begins in what could be just a probing but essentially light-hearted satirical tone as two 'facilitators', husband and wife team Jennifer and Andrew, listen to Anne's strange tale of being tied up and having tape placed over her mouth. They immediately perceive this as the prelude for sexual assault or abuse, ignoring Anne's insistence that there was no abuse, not even any physical conflict or contact. They are already envisaging a fairly conventional sexual thriller, while Anne is soon uncomfortably aware that she is out of her depth.

Faith Healer

by Brian Friel

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 1 August 2016

Directed by Lyndsey Turner and designed by Es Devlin, this production features Stephen Dillane as Frank, the faith healer, Gina McKee as his partner Grace and Ron Cook as Teddy his manager.

The play consists of four monologues given by Frank, Grace, Freddy then Frank again, each actor alone on the stage in a different setting, each recounting directly to the audience some episodes from Frank's itinerant journeys around Wales, Scotland and Ireland as a faith healer who occasionally (but not often) effects cures.

It is an extraordinary theatrical device, removing the usual situation in which characters on stage can interact with one another, and instead relying on extended reminiscence to reveal both character and narrative. Matters are further complicated by the fact that the accounts of the three speakers differ so markedly in some details that it is impossible to know exactly what happened; or rather, it becomes necessary for the audience to include these contradictions in its assessment of the characters and their experiences. Although the general shape of the 'story' seems relatively clear, the different accounts of it are impossible to reconcile with absolute finality.

Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Barbican on 23 October 2015

This production is directed by Lyndsey Turner and designed by Es Devlin, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet, Anastasia Hille as Gertrude, Ciarán Hinds as Claudius and Jim Norton as Polonius.

Anticipation was almost ridiculously high because of Benedict Cumberbatch's huge popularity - tickets sold out within hours over a year before the first performances. Early previews received very mixed responses, not least because of some baffling rearrangements and cuts to the text (though the full text is very rarely performed by anyone). Notoriously, the play began with the 'to be or not to be' speech, though by the time of the official first night this famous soliloquy was placed later (but still, earlier than usual). Reviews of the finished product praised Cumberbatch but found fault with various aspects of the production. 

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

by Caryl Churchill

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 16 April 2015

The play, directed by Lyndsey Turner, features a cast of eighteen speaking actors taking some twenty-seven parts supported by forty-four members of the Community Company, a group created from the outreach work of the National Theatre's Learning Department.

'Light Shining' looks at the English Civil War and the Commonwealth not as a conventional history play dramatising pivotal historical events (the King's duplicity, the battles, and so forth) but rather through a whole series of vignettes in which ordinary people grapple with the perplexing ideas of their time: dissent, obedience, millennial hopes, freedom, bondage, religious faith. The first half closes with scenes from the Putney Debates of 1647, taken from the transcripts of the sessions. Here, significant historical characters such as Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton are indeed present, but there is no attempt to characterise them or to provide their 'back story' - the focus is entirely on the debate concerning democratic representation.