The Stage

Anne Boleyn

Published Thursday 29 July 2010 at 15:07 by Ben Dowell

Playwright Howard Brenton seems a little in love with Anne Boleyn. His version of the life of Henry VIII’s second wife portrays not the self seeking schemer of some historical accounts, but a religious revolutionary, a radical thinker and reformer way ahead of her time.

It is a mouth-watering part for Miranda Raison to play and she does it with charm and gusto in a lavishly dressed production. Brenton’s King and Queen are two people very much in love as well - and there is a delicacy and tenderness to his Henry which never really goes away. At times this seems very much at odds with the historical facts, as well as many people’s sense and image of the bloated tyrant. It also makes his eventual callous move to Jane Seymour seem rather perplexing.

But in many ways this is a story of the English Bible. Rather skillfully, Brenton’s play also casts the action ahead, to the time of James I and the brewing discontent among the warring Protestant factions that were to explode with the English Civil War. Anne’s legacy, we are assured, is a powerful one - she helped give us Protestantism and, in the form of the King James Bible, a text which helped give us Shakespeare and our language. But alongside this interesting historical argument the panache of James Garnon’s performance (declamatory, hilarious and with an armoury of twitches) as James I simply adds to our enjoyment.

At times Brenton, aided by John Dove’s fast-paced, sensitive direction, produces a very witty play. But it’s one which races through huge and complicated areas of history without ever seeming shallow. It is also a personal story and at its heart is Raison’s Anne - sly, impish, playful, full of knowing asides and fun loving. She even has a joke at her own expense, taking her head out of a bloodied sack to show the audience in one of her many addresses to them.

Brenton also manages to extrude the human dimension from the warring religiosity in the Jacobean world - quite some skill when one realises we are dealing with doctrinal and liturgical differences between the Puritans and the fledgling Church of England.

This is no history lecture - perhaps a good thing too - considering the scenes where Anne meets reformer and Bible translator William Tyndale in the woods, something for which there is no historical proof.

Rather, there is a broad brush of truth to this beautifully produced, strangely moving play which feels compelling and genuinely eye opening throughout.

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