1536
By Ava Pickett, Directed by Lyndsey Turner
Event details
Tue 6 May - Sat 7 Jun 2025
Kings don’t kill their wives alright? It’s not – it just don’t happen. It doesn’t.
Tudor England.
A field in Essex.
Three women hurry to their childhood meeting place, thirsty for gossip from London.
Word spreads of a clash between the King, Henry VIII and his Queen, Anne Boleyn. And closer to home, another rumour threatens to catch fire.
As these women realise the parallels between their ordinary, rural lives and the royal drama taking place at a distance, they are faced with several choices, all of which end in violence.
Written as part of the Genesis Almeida New Playwrights, Big Plays Programme, Ava Pickett’s 1536 was the winner of the 2024 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and was commended by The George Devine Award for its “sparkling dialogue and savage undercurrent”. Lyndsey Turner (Chimerica) directs this fiendishly smart and funny new play which asks whether female solidarity can survive in a world where barbarism and misogyny are state sanctioned.
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Creative Team
Ava Pickett
Writer
Ava Pickett
Ava Pickett is a writer and performer; she graduated from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2018 and was also a member of Soho Theatre Writers’ Lab of that year. In 2020 Ava was a resident Playwright at The Mercury Theatre in Colchester.
Ava is also currently developing ideas with Calamity, Big Talk, and Drama Republic with whom she is currently writing a pilot script of her original 60 min show Molly for BBC One. Her half hour comedy The Great Brittons is being developed with Golden Path and has been optioned by Channel 4. She is also writing on Danny Brocklehurst’s latest show Ten Pound Poms for Eleven.
Ava is adapting 90’s film Pret-A-Porter into a TV Series for Miramax and Paramount Plus. She will go on to adapt the first in M.A Bennett’s series of S.T.A.G.S novels for Annapurna and Urban Myth, and then John Wyndham’s The Trouble With Lichen for Route 24.
Radio includes: Roots (Radio 4).
Lyndsey Turner
Director
Production Supporters
1536 is the first play commissioned through the Genesis Almeida New Playwrights, Big Plays Programme to make its world premiere at the Almeida.
The production is generously supported by The Charlotte Aitken Trust and Cockayne Grants for the Arts & The London Community Foundation.
