What a scorcher

“Kings don’t kill their wives alright? It’s not – it just don’t happen. It doesn’t.”

Gossiping, bitching and laughing, the three women at the heart of 1536 follow the twists and turns of Queen Anne Boleyn and the tyrannical King Henry VIII with the same fascination that young women today reserve for Bianca Censori and Kanye West. But for Anna, Jane and Mariella, royal scandal is more than escapism: it offers a warning about their own precarious futures.

The play is punctuated by sex and exactly the bawdy banter you would expect from young women free from the company of men. Yet beneath the raucous humour lies something more subtle. The way these ordinary women navigate the violent, volatile men in their own lives mirror the struggles unfolding at court. There is no escape from male might, nor any morally uncomplicated way of living alongside it. Anna revels in the power beauty affords her over lustful men; Jane places her faith in being a dutiful wife; Mariella, a midwife, has concluded that the safest course is simply to keep out of men’s way.

As a suffocating summer bears down, smoke begins to rise on the horizon. Men in the village are consumed by paranoia, jealousy and suspicion as Henry VIII turns on the woman for whom he broke with Rome. Rumours of women burned for adultery in neighbouring towns drift into their conversations, until the terror of the court can no longer be kept at a distance.

There is no rousing moment in which sisterhood triumphs, and it’s no spoiler to say there is no Thelma & Louise-style finale, complete with a horse chase over a ravine. Instead, the play offers something rarer: a trio of ordinary women negotiating a world in which misogyny is on the march. Its refusal to romanticise either the past or its heroines is precisely what makes 1536 so compelling—and so frighteningly relevant.