The moment Siena Kelly saw a play called 1536 appear on the Almeida’s website, she knew she had to be in it. “I read that it was supposed to be really funny and really violent, which sounded incredibly up my street,” she laughs. Cue a plea to her agent to be put on the casting director’s radar. “[My agent] said, ‘You’re already on their list,’” she recalls. They then cast her, knowing what hundreds of audience members are now realising every night — Kelly was born to play her part.
You will have undoubtedly heard about 1536, the historical drama written by Ava Pickett and produced by Margot Robbie’s company, LuckyChap. Set in the year Henry VIII beheads Anne Boleyn, the play follows three ordinary Essex girls to show how the choices of one powerful man can change the lives of women everywhere.
Following a sold-out run at the Almeida, 1536 transferred to the West End this month. Kelly plays Anna, the most promiscuous and charismatic of the three.
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Robbie was in the audience this month, something which left Kelly unfazed. “I don’t really mind when celebrities are there,” she says. Kelly, a Camden native and ArtsEd graduate, is remarkably chill about many things, including being introduced to the audience every night while having sex against a tree. “Stuff like that means absolutely nothing to me,” she says. “I come from a dance background, so I’m very used to being touched by other people and touching other people.”
Kelly entered her first dance class aged three, before learning to sing and act on her mum’s instruction; “She was like, ‘You can’t just dance, you have to sing and act.’ She’s not in the industry, so I don’t know where she got that information.” Her skill set broke her into theatre, before a role as a porn star in Channel 4’s Adult Material earned her a Bafta nomination at 23. “I am just typecast as a little minx now. I have sex a lot at work, but it’s truly so unsexy when you’re doing it.”
The parallels between 1536 and 2026 are unmistakable, although Kelly insists, “I forgot until we started doing Q and As, and everyone started bringing up Andrew Tate, the manosphere, Donald Trump, Epstein.” She doesn’t have to delve too deeply to access her feminine rage every night, though. “I came of age during liberal fourth wave feminism. We were marching forward,” she says. “But I’m 30 now and it feels so jarring to be like, ‘Oh, what the f***, we’re marching backwards?’”
Kelly is having an “utterly joyous” time on the West End with co-stars Liv Hill and Tanya Reynolds. “We get on like a house on fire. We were begging to share dressing rooms, but we couldn’t, so we all just hang out in the corridor.” But will we see Kelly’s Anna on the small screen? “I can’t comment,” she smiles.
“I can’t comment,” she smiles.
