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?

Force Majeure

adapted by Tim Price from Ruben Östlund's film

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 6 January 2022

Michael Longhurst directs Rory Kinnear as Tomas, Lyndsey Marshall as his wife Ebba, Oliver Savell and Bo Bragason as their children Harry and Vera (in the performance I saw) and Siena Kelly and Sule Rimi as their friends Jenny and Mats in this inventive stage adaptation of the Swedish film Force Majeure released in 2014.

On a fantastically inventive stage designed by Jon Bausor Tomas and his family arrive in a ski resort for a family holiday. The children are fractious, young Harry whining and teenage Vera chilled out, while Ebba ruefully acknowledges to another guest that it is almost imposible to separate her husband from his phone and work commitments. 

Anything could trigger a crisis: an avalanche does the trick, causing Tomas to flip into panicked survivalist mode and then, afterwards, denying his reaction until a video forces him to realise that his memory of events cannot be correct. The impending collapse of his marriage, built as it is on a wearied acceptance of disappointment on the part of his wife, finally forces him to confront his insecurities. In a brilliant counterpoint to his agony, his friend Mats has a soul-searching night arguing with his partner which is a comic tour de force of psychobabble.

It's incredibly ambitious to stage a piece set in a ski resort in the confines of the Donmar stage, but with a steeply raked and white carpeted floor the place is brought to life as various cast members ski unerringly down the slope and into one of the passages used by the audience to reach their seats. In the meantime the crisis afflicting Tomas and his family is played out on the slopes and in their hotel suite. Actors of the calibre of Rory Kinnear and Lyndsey Marshall can be depended on to articulate the emtional rollercoaster of Tomas and Ebba's 'holiday', allowing us to see everything from ridiculousness to self-indulgence to pain, but it is a tribute to the young actors playing their children that sibling brattishness can be so convincingly played and so easily be shown to mask deeper insecurities. Harry can whine with the best of them about his missing sunglasses, but he is clearly anxious when he senses the tensions rising between his parents, while Vera's adolescent stand-offishness masks (as it often does) a deep-seated dependance on the family not being ruffled.

There is a fragile optimism at the end when Harry accusingly asks his father whether he is smoking and Tomas instinctively denies it even while he has a cigarette in his hand. Then he quietly tells his son to ask the question again, and confesses that he is smoking but that he will give it up when they get home. For the first time in years he is not being an invincible man and we can hope that his faltering steps will lead him out of the prison he built himself.

Given the twin dangers of this play wandering into melodrama or mere superficiality it is a credit to all concerned that the balance of humour and agony was finely maintained to produce an enjoyable yet thought provoking entertainment