Anne Boleyn by Howard Brenton

The execution of a secret crusade.

A second play about a woman destroyed by her relationship with a powerful man. It takes us back in time to find the real Anne, not the ambitious witch, the sexual predator of so much popular history, who schemed her way into Henry’s bed and ousted the king’s first wife Catherine of Aragon, but a devoutly religious woman. She was in love with Henry yes but also in love with the most dangerous ideas of her day. She is revealed as an English Joan Of Arc, determined to make England Protestant, who saw off the Pope but then lost her head amidst the vicious political in-fighting of the English court.

Brenton’s re-telling of Anne’s story is not a dry chronicle of Tudor England but a lively and humorous one, described after its triumph at the Globe as a “witty and often laugh-out-loud celebration of a great English heroine.” It will be a spectacular costume drama to end the season.