Stage review: Anne Boleyn, Shakespeare's Globe

Playwright Howard Brenton is entranced by Anne Boleyn. Not only does he imbue the icon with all the womanly virtues that would beguile a royal court but, in this rousing new work, he suggests she was the cunning minx who finally won Henry for Protestantism.

The historians may be scratching their heads at the thesis but nevertheless it provides for more texture, concision and drama in this sprightly take on the well-trod tale.

Brenton's Anne is a thoroughly modern Millie. She parades her wit and chastity for advancement and laces the cocktail with courage, grace and guile.

But always there is an accompanying gamble - she survives solely while she has the heart and interest of the king, a man with an historically short attention span.

Miranda Raison captures the mercurial Anne with warmth and subtlety. At first Anne is the embodiment of old school flirtation - beauty taming the beast with a hint of ankle and an infuriating coolness.

But when she fails to produce an heir, so her lustre fades and she shrinks to become a dysfunctional machine of state.

It is a moving transformation, and only death can restore her youth and playfulness.

For we are told this tale mostly through flashback. Via Anne herself dressed in ghostly white, but mostly through the eccentric King James I played with relish and a concession to comedy by James Garnon who creates a Scottish Eddie Izzard with Tourette's.

These observers conjure a line-up of plotters, rogues, survivors and crooks including Thomas Cromwell, (John Dougall) the grizzled master of realpolitik, his moral compass always dragged to the north of his self interest, and Henry himself (Anthony Howell), a creature of tender and heartless passions, who simply wants to play with power and be unencumbered by its consequences.

So when Anne tells Henry that William Tyndale's proscribed Lutheran book gives him licence to break from Rome, get a divorce and take her to bed it heralds her greatest achievement, and the beginnings of her slide in fortune.

The fall-out of the religious schism is played out with verve and inventiveness in a scene that has James attempting to reunite the still feuding factions around a pragmatic new translation of the Bible, based on the Tyndale's controversial text.

Anne, says the playwright, gave birth both to the glory of Elizabeth and the horror of civil war.

With John Dove's swift and energetic direction, Brenton has constructed a royal play for modern times, ribald, vulgar, knowing and witty and more directly - for modern sensibilities - making religion a stand-in for politics.

He marshals his themes of love, intrigue and betrayal and whets them to an edge as keen as an executioner's sword. His history may be suspect but his craft is sharp and true.

– From August 2010