Anne Boleyn

Synopsis

Compelling, witty and often laugh-out-loud funny, this celebration of a great English heroine, Anne Boleyn leaps cunningly between generations to reveal the debt the outrageous yet scholarly James I owed to Anne when he reconciled England s religious factions by creating his common, ?authorised Bible. Hunting through an old chest, the newly crowned James discovers the controversial legacy of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII s notorious second wife. Time jumps back 70 years, when the witty and flirtatious Anne was in love with Henry, but also with the most dangerous ideas of her day. Conspiring with the exiled William Tyndale, she plots to make England Protestant. For ever.

Our Review:

John Campbell - 1 May 2012

Howard Brenton’s Anne Boleyn won the 2010 Whatsonstage.com audience award and, seeing Jonathan Dove’s clear, vigorous and enormously enjoyable production for the Globe/English Touring Theatre, one can see why. It is an intellectually rich, comic history play full of contemporary resonance, which deals with issues of religion, politics and power and offers some cracking roles for actors.

The play is set in two eras. In the early Jacobean period the twitching, stuttering and defiantly off-message James I (an attractive performance from James Garon) is newly arrived London. He is much exercised by the religious disputes of the day (at one point he says he longs for a country “everyone in church on their knees without really knowing why”). After finding Anne Boleyn’s copy of William Tyndale’s translation of the Bible he goes in search of her ghost with his latest conquest, George Villiers, his curiosity piqued. We also see the familiar story of Anne Bol...

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Latest User Review

Susanna - 4 May 2012:

The musicians are outstanding, the best part of this overly long piece of cod-Shakespeare. Ann is charming and earnest and erudite but but Brenton's James l ticks every hackneyed cliche then crosses it with a Glaswegian stand-up. Great cast, great design, but tired, dated writing...maybe this dialogue of ideas should have been a novel? ...

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