Rewriting her story

By Alex Roy

There is something fitting about celebrating International Women’s Day with a show that began life in a university rehearsal room rather than a gilded West End boardroom. Written by Cambridge University students Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, Six started as a Fringe experiment and unbeknownst to its creators, an impending global theatrical phenomenon; this origin story matters. It reminds us that female storytelling does not require institutional permission. When there is a demand for women to be heard, new musicals can begin simply with the audacity to reimagine history.

Six takes, as its title promises, the six wives of Henry VIII, women long reduced to the mnemonic “divorced, beheaded, died…”, reframing them as pop icons reclaiming their own narratives. Structured as a competitive concert, the show initially transforms victimhood into a scoreboard, with the queen who suffered most at the hands of their infamous husband claiming the right to lead the band. Yet, in the spirit of the feminism it champions, the show refrains from being defined by competition. Transforming individual grievance into collective empowerment, Six pivots towards a rewriting of history — or, as they consistently refrain, ‘her-story’.

Six articulates a celebration of womanhood that feels urgently contemporary

Within this rewriting, Six articulates a celebration of womanhood that feels urgently contemporary. It acknowledges suffering while refusing to allow it to become the defining feature of identity. Anger, grief, and defiance are given space on stage, yet trauma is never permitted to eclipse the women themselves. Instead, through the plurality of expression in both appearance and tone, Six insists that there is no singular way to inhabit either power or pain.

It is this very plurality that I wish to foreground. Too often, conversations about “female empowerment” flatten difference in favour of marketable slogans. Six, however, resists such flattening, suggesting instead that womanhood is not a uniform but an expansive and evolving reality.

Recent casting choices have deepened this conversation further. The decision to cast Dylan Mulvaney — a transgender woman and digital creator whose public transition has been both celebrated and heavily scrutinised — marks a significant moment in the show’s evolution. Mulvaney stepping into the boots of Tudor queen Anne Boleyn is not a departure from Six’s ethos, but a continuation of it. The musical has always been concerned with authorship: reclaiming stories historically controlled by men and retelling them through a different lens. By casting a trans woman in this reimagined history, the production powerfully affirms that womanhood is not a closed, static category confined to inaccessible historical periods. Instead, it is a lived reality for billions of women across the world every single day.

There is room for everyone to be celebrated — both on stage and off

In a climate where transgender women are frequently excluded from discussions of womanhood, this casting choice carries profound weight. It expands the show’s celebration of women to include those whose identities are too often politicised or contested. In doing so, it reinforces the central message of the finale: there is room for everyone to be celebrated — both on stage and off.

There is also something particularly affirming about Six’s trajectory for those of us immersed in student theatre communities. That a student-written piece could evolve into an international cultural touchstone speaks to the power of youthful creativity. It reminds us that the rehearsal rooms of today are not peripheral to the industry; they are its future — its future of writing, performing, directing, choreographing, and band-playing.

On International Women’s Day, Six stands as a reminder that celebration itself can be expansive. It can be joyous while remaining conscious of historical injustice. It can acknowledge the structures that constrained women without allowing those structures to dictate the narratives we tell today.

By reclaiming six women from the margins of a patriarchal narrative and inviting performers of all backgrounds to inhabit their stories, Six offers a blueprint for an expansive, collaborative feminism. It suggests that empowerment is not a finite resource to be competed over, but a collective project to be undertaken together.

On a day dedicated to celebrating women in all their complexity, that feels like exactly the sentiment we should be foregrounding.

Illustration: Atharva Kamboj