Six
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
A four-piece female rock band – The Ladies in Waiting – greet the audience as they take their seats. The strains of Greensleeves, the old English folk air often misattributed to Henry VIII, are just audible amid the electronic twang of the keyboard and bass guitar.
The juxtaposition of traditional material with contemporary instrumentation sets the tone for this irreverent rewriting of British Tudor history, where the leading ladies are Henry VIII’s six wives, newly cast as pop princesses, who are desperate to climb out of the footnotes of history into the limelight.
If you are to believe their hype, the wives are more than mistresses of mere misfortune. In an X Factor-style sing-off they solicit our sympathies for their various sufferings – rejection, miscarriages, betrayal, beheading – but they will also illuminate their many achievements as multilinguists, religious reformers and divorcees at a time when marriage was a sacred vow.
In a clever metatheatrical twist as the competition reaches its climax, they recast the parameters of the Bechdel test: we might not know about them if they weren’t part of the monarch’s marital menagerie, they admit, but why do we remember Henry VIII anyway?
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This well-oiled touring production reaches for the energy of a stadium show, but on a hot first night in Dublin the cast has to work hard to win the audience over.
They are all terrific singers, which is no mean feat considering the surprising complexity of the score. Drawing from contemporary pop, Six’s creators and composers, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, offer a little bit of everything to the audience, and this demands a little bit of everything from the singers too, in both a solo capacity and as backup artists, from the deep bass beats of German techno to the high-octane octaves of a mournful ballad.
By contrast, the storytelling demands are not always met by the less-experienced performers. They might do well to pay attention to the solo of the Six veteran Alexia McIntosh, as Anna of Cleves, who offers a masterclass in clarity. If the audience really were to vote on which queen deserved the crown, McIntosh would surely win it.
The competitive conceit on which Six hangs concludes with a call for solidarity, however, with the six women claiming their place in the textbooks, their “crowning glory”, together. “History’s about to get overthrown.”
Six is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, June 28th
