Like many British schoolchildren, Ava Pickett chanted the “Divorced, beheaded, died” rhyme about Henry VIII’s six wives – and it has stayed in her head ever since. So much so that her play 1536 pivots around the last days of the second wife, Anne Boleyn. Pickett’s history lessons covered Boleyn’s magnificent rise – which sparked a passion so great the king bent constitutional law to marry her – as well as the torrid details of her downfall and beheading. Pickett believed the “facts” (that Boleyn committed treason, that she slept with her brother) until she didn’t. “The older I got,” says the 31-year-old, “the more I thought, ‘I don’t buy that.’”
Named after the year of Boleyn’s death, 1536 comes at the queen’s story sideways. She is not seen on stage but is talked about by three young women who meet in an Essex field, in between work, to quibble and gossip about men, haircuts and the king’s bride. Their predicaments gain chilling resonances as the local men become more puritanical, mirroring the patriarchal violence of Henry’s court.
