The malicious and the mad

Set in the year of Anne Boleyn’s execution, 1536 premiered at the Almeida 12 months ago and blazed like a comet for its five-week run. It received two Olivier nominations, for best director (Lyndsey Turner) and best new play, and writer Ava Pickett won a prize for it. Now, after the BBC commissioned it as a six-part TV drama, it has transferred to the West End. It has also picked up Barbie star and Hollywood darling Margot Robbie as a producer. Oh, and Pickett is working with film director Baz Luhrmann on a script about Joan of Arc. All of which suggests 1536 must be pretty good.

When the play opens, Anna, the village beauty, is enjoying a knee-trembler up against a tree. Well, perhaps “enjoying” is a little strong. It’s evident that her lover, Richard, has found their tryst much more satisfying than she has. From the very beginning, 1536 is all about the fact that men can take exactly what they want while women can go hang. Or worse. 

Anna (Sienna Kelly), who is in service, is friends with two other women in her Essex village. Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) is an apprentice midwife who has seen the man she loves, William, marry someone more befitting his social status. Jane (Liv Hill), from a relatively wealthy family, is set to wed soon. These three young Essex women regularly meet in a field — the play’s only location — to exchange gossip and discuss the scarcely believable news from far away London. Anne Boleyn, it seems, has been thrown in the Tower on charges of treason. It is said she has been “loose”, sleeping with all and sundry. If the Queen can fall victim to vicious gossip and toxic masculinity, what chance do three lowly Essex girls have? Each time the three meet, the news is worse and the local men seem to be lapping it up. And then two women are burned to death in a nearby village. By their husbands.

Pickett, a 32-year-old from Colchester, who has been in the writers’ room on a number of TV series, has said that at the time she was writing 1536, she was feeling overwhelmed by the number of news stories about violence against women and girls. After each horrific new report, there would be an outpouring of rage and then solemn declarations that things need to change but then, within days, the news cycle moved on and nothing at all changed. 

The writer somehow turned her rage and frustration into a very sharp, funny script. The dialogue is contemporary — our three heroines swear like troopers. There’s a real sense of the long history of their friendship, and its shifting dynamics are beautifully depicted by the three actresses who played the same roles in the original production. When events place that friendship under strain, it is almost painful to watch. And although men in general are the villains, the two in the play — Richard (Oliver Johnstone) and William (George Kemp) — are three-dimensional characters rather than mere ciphers.

The show plays for two hours without an interval and the audience laughter, abundant at the start, becomes increasingly nervous, eventually stopping altogether. I’ll remember the brilliant but bleak ending for a long time. Astonishingly, this is Pickett’s first play. I think everyone who sees it will want to see whatever she does next.

1536 is set 500 years ago but feels very relevant. Equus, another award-winning play featuring toxic masculinity, was written 50 years ago but feels completely out of date.

Alan Strang (Noah Valentine) is a 17-year-old boy who is sexually aroused by horses. These days he’d simply attend the relevant minority sexual interest group meeting at his local library and hang out with like-minded folk. Maybe he’d go on a couple of pro-horse love marches or appear on a Channel 4 reality show. But back in 1973, fancying a horse — and I don’t mean in the sense of picking a winner in the 2:30 at Goodwood — was considered somewhat problematic. Especially if you’d also blinded six of them with a metal spike.

Unaccountably, the magistrate presiding over Strang’s trial doesn’t want to send him to prison. Instead she persuades psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Toby Stephens) to take him on and find out why he’s committed such an appalling crime. But as Dysart tries to work out what makes the boy tick, he becomes less and less convinced that he is, in any real sense, helping the lad.

Peter Shaffer’s play was first performed by the National Theatre company, then housed at the Old Vic, and it was an instant hit. Lauren Bacall and John Betjeman were among those who wrote fan letters to Shaffer. The subsequent Broadway production won two Tonys, for best play and director. Shaffer, whose next play would be Amadeus, quipped: “In London, Equus caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.”

The problem with the play today is that it depends heavily on discredited ideas and concepts. Back in 1973, people still believed in Freudian analysis and hypnosis. They believed that serious mental illness was a puzzle that could be solved by a therapist cross-examining a patient until he eventually made his way back to the historical “trauma” that was causing the problem. Excavating “repressed” memories enabled the patient to be free of their malign influence. It was believed that a few ill-considered remarks from mum or dad could turn a child into a psychotic eye-stabbing maniac. 

And then there’s Dysart’s daft “maybe-we’re-the-mad-ones” concerns which clearly owed more than a little to R.D. Laing’s theories about “madness” being a response to an insane world. You want to shake the shrink and say, “Pal, I’m pretty sure it’s the kid who attacked a load of horses with a sharp metal object who is bonkers”.

Nevertheless, if you can get over the silliness this is a compelling, almost mesmerising production, directed by Lindsay Posner and played out on a near bare stage. There are terrific performances from Stephens and Valentine and from the six actors playing horses — bare-chested, smeared in body make-up — who strike up strange and unsettling equine poses and radiate an alien intensity. 

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1536 at the www.theambassadorstheatre.co.uk runs until 1 August. 

Equus at the www.menierchocolatefactory.com runs until 4 July.