Henry VIII’S wives all compare notes in this zippy musical
Six Arts Theatre ★★★★☆
Approaching Six – a musical about the six wives of Henry VIII – at the bedraggled tail-end of the Edinburgh Festival, I felt (not to dress it up) like a man hauled to the execution block, awaiting a bloody, gruesome ordeal. The show, according to the publicity blurb accompanying its West End run at the Arts which begins this week, remixes “500 years of herstorical heartbreak into a 75-minute celebration of sisterly sassitude”.
No disrespect to “sisterly sassitude”, but there’s quite a lot of it about at the moment and, just as Henry VIII overdid it on spit-roasted boar and grilled beavers’ tails, you can have too much of a good thing. I envisaged something cheap, cheerful and yes, absolutely frightful – dumbed-down and streetwise. A cartoon history lesson for people with no concentration span.
To some extent, you could say that the 75-minute theatre-meets-pop event – which started out as a student production on the fringe last year – does indeed speak most (in fact yells loudest) to the selfie-taking, mobile-jabbing teenager or tweenager. It’s the opposite of a composed, scholarly account of those benighted Tudor brides. If you want thorough analysis, you’d be better off consulting Alison Weir’s excellent 2007 book on the subject. And if the idea of crossing
Greensleeves with a techno beat strikes you as a mash-up made in hell, be warned: this is “that” show.
The grand surprise, though, is just how gloriously – persuasively – coherent, confident and inventive the whole thing is. The upfront thesis is to take us beyond the rudiments of that kindergarten mnemonic “Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived”. Even if you don’t come away having learnt a great deal, your curiosity is piqued.
At root, co-creators Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss are indulging in the kind of “what if?” that makes history exciting: imagine if all those wives were in the same space – ostensibly to compete in a kind of Simon Cowellesque competition to see who had it worst: what would they say?
Part of the pleasure lies in the spectacle of one-up-womanship – the rivalry to assert maximum victimhood unleashing back-stabbing wit and lung-busting bids to steal the crown of the audience’s final approval. Dressed to kill in punkish variants of period dress, the sextet (with all-female backing band and niftily directed by Moss with Jamie Armitage) display a Spice Girls slickness as they strut and synchronise their moves, snapping into line to form a fearsome regiment of defiant self-possession. But it’s the chinks in their respective armour that let real, relatable feeling seep in.
“He starts coming home late – ‘I was just out with my ministers’ – but there’s lipstick on his ruff,” raps Jarneia Richard-noel’s Catherine of Aragon, whose everything wasn’t enough. There’s a brittleness to the minxiness of Millie O’connell’s Anne Boleyn, a fragility to her down-with-the-kids LOLS. “It didn’t matter how many stupid things he did. I was there, by his side,” interjects Natalie Paris’s Jane Seymour, wearing her heartbreak on her sleeve in a melancholy ballad that makes the hairs on the back on your neck stand up.
The switches in tempo and shifts in genre – from soul to electro – suggest that Marlow and Moss have learnt much from Hamilton, which the show at times recalls. Yet it has its own manifest cheeky British personality – and (with the cast completed by Alexia Mcintosh, Aimie Atkinson and Maiya Quansah-breed) a dynamism that matches the best the West End has to offer. Unlike its hapless subjects, it llooks set to have a long and happy life.
From tomorrow to Oct 14. Tickets: 020 7836 8463; artstheatrewestend.co.uk