Anne Boleyn is both a history play and a séance: she is manic, extravagant and difficult to forget.
The trouble with putting Anne Boleyn on stage is that everyone thinks they already know her, whether that’s the second wife, the six-fingered witch or the woman whose neck was famously slender enough for a French swordsman to manage in one clean stroke. Howard Brenton’s script, first commissioned for Shakespeare’s Globe in 2010, refuses the traditional biography to adapt to a ghost story. James Ist picks over Anne’s old belongings on his accession to the English throne and finds himself pursued by her spectre ever after, letting the play jump out of order through Anne’s life at will and always circling back to James.
What this production adds to that premise is a lead performance pitched somewhere close to fanaticism. Anne is not just ambitious, she’s a woman in the grip of religious zeal and someone for whom sleeping with a king is a means to an evangelical end. This Anne is unsettling because she seems to believe every word of her own myth-making, which makes her scheming feel like conviction rather than Tudor court.
Two walls anchor the space throughout, shifting the room from palace to bedchamber to the more liminal territory the play needs for its wood scenes, where trees are wheeled in and out, the forest never overstays its welcome, and the sense of Anne slipping between worlds (the political and the otherworldly) is served by scenery that can vanish just as quickly as it arrives.
Where the production really spends its budget, though, is in costume. Anne’s startling red coronation gown makes its appearance multiple times throughout the play and throughout time. Elsewhere the period silhouette is pushed to its full, padded structured skirts and exaggerated hips. This is a large cast, and every single one of them is dressed as elaborately as the last. It gives the whole performance the feel of a big production, in a way that a lot of history plays hemmed in by budget may not manage.
Brenton’s script still has its curiosities tucked in among the politics and theology, such as an engaging digression on Tudor contraceptive methods and that Anne reportedly kept Henry waiting seven years before she’d sleep with him, which appears as a larger piece of political strategy than it perhaps sounds on paper. These almost trivia details that could easily feel like padding, but it ultimately fits into the play’s larger argument that Anne wasn’t merely surviving Henry VIII – she was but managing him.
This production won’t convert anyone who arrives determined to see Anne as the tragic ingénue of The Tudors. But as a ghost story about a woman who refused to disappear quietly, this is a satisfying watch: fanatical, well-dressed, and considerably stranger than the history books tend to let on!
Anne Boleyn runs at the Tower Theatre, London until Saturday 1st August. Tickets here.