THREE WOMEN AND A DISTANT QUEEN
Ava Pickett’s breathlessly exciting début play won, at the Almeida, both a prestigious prize and mixed reviews. As a first-timer, seeing its transfer to the West End, I can say that it well deserves the move, and that it keeps all the unsettling intimacy and power that split the critics. And it’s piquant to have a more sobering reflection on Anne Boleyn running here: seven minutes’ walk from the latest cast raving through the riotous SIX on the Strand.
So I liked it a lot: beautifully set amid reedy grass and stunted trees in the Essex countryside , three young women meet, gossip, and express their daily concerns and fears . Gradually the news comes in about the arrest of Queen Anne Boleyn and her imprisonment, trial and death. The passage of days, sunsets and a terrible distant bonfire of celebration is achieved with Jack Knowles’ remarkably fine lighting; Lyndsey Turner’s direction keeps it moving, and the characters are firmly distinct, recognizable to anyone who has been a girl, without being caricatures.
SIena Kelly’s Anna is sexy, triumphant in her power of attraction and first seen vigorously at it against a tree, but she is clearly in love as well as lust. Liv Hill’s cautious, rulebound Jane is scornful of Anna’s ways and her faster wit – “all you do is kiss , all you do is tell” . But she herself is engaged for family and community reasons to the very man – Richard – who is Anna’s lover. Mariella – Tanya Reynolds – is almost the most interesting: rather unwillingly inherits a trade as a midwife (a dangerous one, as it proves, easily blamed for the many perinatal tragedies of the period). She has had her own love with a local grandee, William, whose wife’s baby she now must deliver. Like Anna, she is of a perceptibly lower social scale than Jane. But Jane is scared of her affianced Richard, who does not love her. After their wedding night all he can say of his bride, wandering lustfully back to Anna, is “all she does is eat, pray and tremble”.
Pickett’s sharp, modern-spoken dialogue draws us easily into the ordinary rural 16c world of girls no different from us in heart but confined in a harsher society. The play was criticized as ‘yet another’ one about patriarchy, but come on! This stuff happened. Ask any beheaded queen, burnt adulteress or obedient skivvy. The reports about the imprisoned queen feel distant and grand to the girls (“Kings don’t kill their wives!” “A lot of things kings don’t do, he’s done!”) . But they’re also familiar: a scornful phrase about “not the kind of woman who needs to be forced” ‘ occurs both about Boleyn and, much later, about Anna.
In one sharp moment, hearing that Boleyn is still in the tower, the three react in turn : “She must be terrified” “She must be furious” “She must be starving”. They are all haunted by her, and see what her fate symbolizes in their own female helplessness. Anna in particular, bucking and cussing against the way the world is, resents the ease with which rumours about a distant queen’s misdeeds are accepted, not least by Jane: the distant woman’s treason and adultery are something for the men to enjoy talking about . Her death – in a horrifying late moment – has them keeping the distant pubs open to celebrate, bonfires staibning the innocent Essex sky.
But Pickett’s courage lies equally in showing how, when the worst happens, there is no guaranteed sisterhood or revolt. Terrified women can turn on one another to save themselves. She also allows a touch generosity towards the two men, as their dominance and rage is in moments diluted by an ability to be weakened – if not saved – by the need for women’s love. It’s a play to unsettle and annoy, but also to admire and love. As I did.
Atgtickets.com to 1 August
rating 5
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