The Six Wives of Henry VIII

It was a common complaint amongst those who read Hilary Mantel’s two Booker Prize winning novels about the court of Henry VIII, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. They were masterful as far as they went, but where was the Kraftwerk-style song about Anne of Cleves’ ugliness?

Thankfully, Stu McLoughlin and Howard Coggins (aka Bristol’s comedy-drama company Living Spit) have made up for Mantel’s oversight.

The Six Wives of Henry VIII, their retelling of Henry’s life, love and lusts has lashings of cross-dressing, comedy country songs, and po-faced German electronica. This is Horrible Histories for grown-ups.

Coggins plays Henry remarkably close to Mantel’s vision of the king as an occasionally thoughtful, frequently self-pitying boor obsessed with having a son. It is the doomed wives that generate most of the laughs, all archly played by McLoughlin in a range of revealing dresses and accents.

To cover huge chunks of history, the pace is frenetic. The duo flit smoothly from one dramatic style to another. The appointment of the first Archbishop of Canterbury is handled like Britain’s Got Talent; Catherine Howard’s infidelities are revealed via a Jeremy Kyle-esque polygraph test.

Things only splutter slightly when they step away from the history and introduce a subplot about the internal tension between the two actors. It is engaging, but when you have beheadings and nasty medieval diseases to play with, it is far from essential. 

Ultimately, The Six Wives of Henry VIII is as bawdy and fun as a Tudor banquet, minus the forced laughter to appease a temperamental monarch. With a zingy script and hugely charismatic performances, every laugh here is well earned.