Best known to history as Bloody Mary, Queen Mary Tudor is the oft-overlooked first Queen of England. Overshadowed by her womanising father and her longer-reigning sister, Mary’s legacy is frequently reduced to a footnote in history.
In Bloody Mary: Live!, Olivia Miller uses stand up comedy to give Mary a platform to tell her story her own way.
The comedy framing, from the very beginning, forces you to reframe how you see Mary. You have to forget the brutal tyranny of her family’s reign over Britain, over her father’s rehaul of religion in England and the murder or exile of her various wives. You have to forget, for a moment, that as Queen Mary oversaw the burning at the stake of hundreds of people.
For the sake of show, you have to simply see Mary as a human being taking control of a narrative that, by now, others have written for centuries.
Mary’s clothes add to this effect. She doesn’t appear in an elegant period gown as you might imagine. As hilarious as the mental image of authentically presented Tudor nobility attempting stand up comedy may be, that’s not the image this show is going for.
Instead, Mary is the picture of teenage rebellion. Miniskirt, fishnets, big boots and collar all combine to create a very different impression. She’s a young girl, like many others, processing trauma and attempting self-expression without the benefit of fully developed tools with which to do so.
This sets the stage for the stand up. Mary begins her set by talking about her father’s messy series of marriages. She takes the very relatable premise of being a child of divorce and ramps it up to a thousand. Bloody Mary: Live! is evidently very well written in the way that it eases you into the story at its core with those elements of a human’s life that a contemporary audience of non-royals can connect with.
There are audience participation segments that draw you into this sense of familiarity with a character that really shouldn’t have anything in common with any contemporary person. The show has jokes about how Mary has a teenage crush on her tutor, equating his ability to play the harpsichord with modern day rockstars.
Mary talks about how she bickers with her parents, first about the sort of things anyone might have as a teenager, but gradually about more niche issues. In this sense, the show is very well constructed. By the time Mary’s problems become distinctly unique, you’re on her side. You understand her very human feelings of isolation and loneliness enough that the context of it isn’t as important.
It doesn’t matter that you haven’t experienced your mother being exiled from your country and being kept as a maidservant to your younger siblings. What matters is that you understand – maybe even like – Mary enough to see how difficult this is for her. There’s a sense of dread at the inevitability of Mary’s Joker-esque response to her trauma and the famous slaughters that followed when she rose to power.
Bloody Mary: Live! uses dark humour, with an addictive playfulness, to explore the context in which this child grew up to become a ruler that history remembers as bloody. It gives a human angle to a narrative that frequently doesn’t have one. It doesn’t deny the fact that Mary Tudor did horrible things during her reign. But it does point out that, frankly, so did the rulers that came before and after her who are remembered much more fondly.
It doesn’t just humanise Mary. It also shines a light on how horrific it is that her mother and stepmothers are often reduced to a rhyme that catalogues their brutal deaths and little else about who they were as people. In doing this, it makes you think about how history remembers women. About how even contemporary women, particularly when they are leaders or have influence, are discussed compared to their male counterparts.
And, even though the woman behind the show Olivia Miller is an actor and writer before she is a comedian, it does so through legitimately good comedy. She throws cultural references into her set. She engages well with the audience, both broadly and in direct conversation with some people. She even takes some particularly fun jabs at the contemporary royal family. Maybe there are some jokes that you’ll better understand if you’re already a bit of a history nerd, but it does a good job of explaining the story to a wider audience.
Bloody Mary: Live! is a show that you have to go into willing to laugh at death and pain. It is certainly a dark comedy at its core – and its creators know how to use that genre to their desired effect.
Read our interview with creator Olivia Miller here.
Find out if Bloody Mary: Live! is playing near you by checking out Olivia’s LinkTree.
Keep up with Olivia’s work by checking out her website and following her on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
