When will it stop?
A triumphant West End transfer raises uncomfortable questions
“Has it always been like this? Will it always be like this?”
Those lines, spoken by one of the three female characters in the play 1536, don’t sound like much but they sent a chill through me this week. Anyone who has read this newsletter or listened to my podcast The London Theatre Review (new season just started, theatre fans) at any point in the last year will already know my feelings on the show, which has just transferred to the Ambassador’s Theatre.
1536 is the year that Henry VIII had his wife, Anne Boleyn, who at the time was somewhere between 29 and 35 (nobody actually knows her birth date), arrested on trumped-up charges of treason and then executed, seemingly because she was getting on his nerves, his eye was trained elsewhere, and she hadn’t yet given birth to a boy.
What I’ve seen
I nodded, involuntarily, when I heard those words, sitting in the dark auditorium, and that’s not good, is it?
That this play, set 500 years ago, should open in the West End just a month after the discovery of the Motherless website and chat group, on which men shared stories and tips on drugging and raping their wives and girlfriends – the men those women had children with, shared their lives with; to whom they were grateful for a cup of tea at the end of a long day, not knowing what was in it – and in the midst of the seemingly endless revelations about the men who were cosy with Jeffrey Epstein (I just finished Ellie Leonard’s report on his friendship with the journalist Michael Wolff, which doesn’t make for edifying reading), is… crushing, honestly.
It’s hard not to think, when in the UK a woman is killed by a man on average once every three days, that the answer to both questions is “yes”. In Mexico right now, in the thick of what can only be described as a femicide epidemic, it’s about ten per day. Per fucking day. And men wonder why they’re a bit lonely.
