As theatres cautiously reopened in Autumn 2021, post-lockdown, across the country, tickets went on sale for Hilary Mantel’s dramatization of her novel The Mirror and the Light, playing at London’s Gielgud Theatre from September. The final volume of Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy perhaps demonstrates most clearly the novelist’s unique capacity to write historical figures who feel familiar, to reveal the past as challengingly continuous with the present. For Mantel, her novels tell history as political, for ‘There is no life without politics’. But as the success of the dramatic adaptations of the first two Cromwell novels, Olivier- and Tony-award-winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, has perhaps already suggested, her novels are also profoundly theatrical. Meanwhile, in a rather different Tudor register, but also revealing a curious sense of both the theatricality and the immediacy of history, SIX reopened at the Lyric Theatre, London:

SIX, a musical about Tudor history written by a pair of Cambridge undergraduates for the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe, has become the perhaps rather surprising object of mass teenage adulation on both sides of the Atlantic. Taken up by talent scouts, it transferred, with a professional cast, to the Arts Theatre in the West End, and was due to open on Broadway just as the theatres closed for the COVID pandemic: its first Broadway performance was thus delayed until 17 September 2021. It imagines a pop contest among six queens, in which the role of lead singer will be awarded to whichever queen can prove she has suffered most at the hands of their common husband, Henry VIII. Each in turn has a song with which to make her case, until the last queen, Catherine Parr, questions whether it is right that they should all allow themselves to be defined in relation to their husband – they have spent ‘too many years stuck in his-story’. The queens agree that they do not need Henry, and in a grand finale imagine their stories rewritten as musical successes: Catherine of Aragon joins a gospel choir; Anne Boleyn becomes a song-writer for Shakespeare; Jane Seymour has several more children and sets up a family rock group, ‘The Royalling Stones’, and so on …