“The dramas that feel epic, life-changing and impossible to escape don’t just happen to kings, queens and heroes. They happen in Clacton, Southend, Chelmsford and countless other places,” writes Ava Pickett in a programme note introducing her new play, a thrilling modern-day respin of the story of Helen of Troy. Well, not the part of the story that is in The Iliad, but the undocumented domestic aftermath, when Helen was returned to her home after 10 years of a war that resulted from her absconding with the Trojan prince, Paris.
We are in present-day Essex and the air is full of expletives, most of them uttered by Michelle Dockery, known to millions as the elegantly aloof Lady Mary Crawley in Downton Abbey.
I cannot imagine that many writers would persuade Dockery to return to the stage – and the stage of the decidedly unglamorous Theatre Royal Stratford East, at that – after an absence of some years, but then Ada Pickett is not just any playwright. She is the hottest name in theatre, currently engaged in co-writing a script with Baz Luhrmann for a film about Joan of Arc.
If you haven’t heard of her yet, you will do soon, for she is also crafting a series for the BBC based on 1536, the play that made her name. This electrifying three-hander – one of my top three theatre choices for 2025 – premiered at the Almeida Theatre and has just finished a much-deserved West End run, starring Ted Lasso’s Tanya Reynolds. One of Pickett’s myriad skills is that she writes phenomenally meaty roles for women.
Michelle Dockery, Laura Aikman and Ellie Turner in rehearsal for Ava Pickett’s new play ‘Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy’ (Photo: Pamela Raith)1536 was, astoundingly, her debut drama, a dream start to any writer’s career. Set in the titular year, it is an earthily witty study of three young woman living in the Essex countryside and hearing fragments of rumours about the terrible fate of their former idol, Anne Boleyn. If even the Queen could be so badly treated by her husband, what did it all mean for them, they wondered? I struggle to think of a more complete and perfect first play and it was no surprise when Pickett won the Most Promising Playwright prize at the Critics’ Circle Awards earlier this year. With this one play, Pickett burst onto the scene, ensuring that her subsequent work would generate considerable interest.
Which brings us back to Michelle Dockery, covered in blood, stomping around in combat gear and effing and blinding like a trooper as she fights back against her husband and brother-in-law’s plan to return to business as usual.
Pickett taps into a bubbling seam of recognisable national anger, redolent of the anti-migrant protests at the Bell Hotel in Epping that lit the fuse for widespread outrage. Helen’s new love Paris, you see, was “not properly English”, a “foreign bloke” and this did not sit well with her husband Marcus and his aggressively macho brother Mario, the sort of men who simmer with anger under a thin veneer of blokey geniality. They cleverly managed to turn this domestic drama into a symbol of England’s green and pleasant land being overtaken by foreigners and national riots ensued.
Awkwardly for their narrative, Helen loved Paris and had left very much of her own free will. Her former best friend Cee (Laura Aikman, Smithy’s perpetually discontented fiancée Sonia in Gavin and Stacey), married to the volatile Mario, stayed and there follows a healthy questioning of the expectations placed upon wives and mothers down the centuries. Why is a mother leaving her children deemed to be so much worse than a father doing the same?
This isn’t a perfect play; as 1536 so amply demonstrated, Pickett works better when applying her lively style to a historical context (her modern-day updating of Jane Austen’s Emma, at the Rose Theatre Kingston last autumn, was unconvincing). Yet the energy and ambition are evident and there can be no doubting that we are watching the early work of a major talent. Who else would bring Greek mythology to Essex and describe Aries as a “c**ty little god”? I have not felt so excited about a playwright since I saw the first few historical dramas by the now mighty James Graham (Dear England) in a small room above a pub in Earl’s Court.
‘Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy’ is at the Theatre Royal Stratford East to 10 October (stratfordeast.com )
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