Review: 1536, Ambassadors Theatre ★★★★

The women history forgot have found a playwright worthy of them.

In May 1536, Anne Boleyn was beheaded in the Tower of London. Her fall from Queen to condemned traitor took a matter of weeks. History has recorded Henry’s version of events with exhaustive thoroughness. The women who watched from a distance, gossiping in Essex fields, going home to be beaten, giving birth without witnesses who would speak for them: those women left almost nothing in the archive. As historian Suzannah Lipscomb writes in the programme, it is not that they lacked thoughts and experiences. It is that the archive asked us to side with the powerful, and the powerful were not them.

Ava Pickett is from Colchester. It feels significant. Her debut play, written through the Genesis Almeida New Playwrights programme and now transferred to the West End following a sold-out run at the Almeida, sets its action in an Essex field in the year of Anne Boleyn’s downfall. Three women meet at their childhood gathering place, hungry for news from London. As the way they are permitted to refer to Anne shifts from queen, to “you better not call her that,” to something far uglier (“the great whore”), the precariousness of their own position sharpens into focus.

Pickett won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for this play, was commended by the George Devine Award, was named Most Promising Playwright at the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, and received an Olivier nomination for Best New Play. She had also, before any of this, written for The Great, Brassic, and The Buccaneers, and is now co-writing Baz Luhrmann’s Jehanne d’Arc. She writes with a fierceness and wit that belies her years, and 1536 announces a major theatrical voice. London audiences can see her work again in Autumn with new play Bloodsport (after Helen of Troy) at Stratford East.

The three women at the centre of the play represent, with merciless economy, the few options available to women of the period. We have a potential wife (who is beaten), amidwife (who risks accusation of witchcraft if a birth goes wrong), and a woman who is sexually free but judged by others.

Lyndsey Turner‘s direction holds the reins with absolute command. The tone shifts from boisterous comedy to dread and back again with apparent effortlessness, though the craft required to achieve that is considerable. Pickett’s decision to give these Tudor women the modern vernacular of Essex girls on a night out is one of the production’s great strengths: it strips away any musty period-piece distance and plants them squarely in the present tense. Much of the swearing is genuinely, brilliantly funny, landing with real comic force. Occasionally the expletives accumulate past the point of maximum impact, and as with any well-deployed weapon, restraint would sharpen the effect further. But this is a minor caveat in a production of otherwise exceptional control.

Liv Hill, Siena Kelly, and Tanya Reynolds are incandescent. Each brings a completely specific energy to her role, and yet the three of them together achieve that rarest theatrical alchemy: a group whose chemistry feels like something that has simply always existed. The audience, knowing how history ends, watches with the strange dread of people peering through their fingers. The ending is foreshadowed, yes, and perhaps deliberately so. Its inevitability is part of the point. These women were trapped, and the play makes us feel the walls closing in alongside them.

Max Jones‘s design is striking in its bold simplicity: a dry Essex field, a leaning dead tree, tall grasses catching the light, and a luminous screen at the back that shifts between beautiful and ominous. Framed by a thin neon line, it has the quality of a painting viewed from slightly too close. Jack Knowles‘s lighting makes the most of every gradation, and Tingying Dong‘s sound design is as unsettling as it is precise.

The Ambassadors Theatre suits the play well. The ornate gilded proscenium arch around that stark field feels like the frame of a history that has kept these women at a distance for too long.

The question the play asks, quietly and then with increasing urgency, is the one that lands: has it always been like this? Will it always be like this? Pickett brings this question ringing down the ages.

Has it always been like this? Will it always be like this?” Three women in an Essex field, and the most urgent question in the West End.

All photos: Helen Murray

Ambassadors Theatre, West Street, London, WC2H 9ND. Running until 1 August 2026. Running time approximately 1 hour 50 minutes, no interval. Book at atgtickets.com

Content warnings: strong language, depictions of violence, sexual assault, discussion of miscarriage, rape, domestic violence, and traumatic childbirth. Recommended for ages 15 and over.

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