Three brilliant siblings in the Tudor machine of power - on the Chichester stage

He gets to tick it off as he steps into the shoes of Thomas Boleyn, father of Anne and Mary, in the tudor epic The Other Boleyn Girl which opens the 2024 season on the main-house stage. Mike Poulton’s adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s novel runs until Saturday, May 11.

“I am from Portsmouth originally. My dad was in the Royal Navy. He was chaplain to the dockyard when I was very little so I grew up in the dockyard in Portsmouth. It was a good address but it was quite difficult getting in and out! But the first show I remember seeing as a boy was in Chichester and it must have been when I was about six or seven and I remember being absolutely mesmerised. It was called The Selfish Shellfish... which is quite a vocal warm-up in itself!”

As for The Other Boleyn Girl, Ben, who has lived in Brighton for the past eight years or so, is relishing all the challenges that Thomas Boleyn offers, not least the burning question whether he is a baddie or not: “That's one of the things I have struggled with. As an actor you always try to find something human and to be sympathetic about the character you're playing or else it just becomes a bit arch, but history has not been kind to Thomas Boleyn. The word pimp is the word used in the book and yes, you could certainly look at it like that. I suppose the point is that we try to draw modern equivalents and you can look and see him as the equivalent of new money being highly ambitious and just desperate to get to the top position. My job is to find a way into that human character. Here's this man who wants to be accepted by the nobility and perhaps he has a God-given duty to get the best position he can in his life. But no, history has not been kind to him and I have to look at the text that Mike has produced and try to work my way through to find whatever it is about his relationship with his children. You've got to link into the Tudor mindset and realise that perhaps it's not so unusual for parenting to be so unattached. You have to realise that probably nobody else would be quite so shocked that Thomas Boleyn is trying to push his daughters into the eye of the king so that he might get another castle. You can sense the modern audience will feel shocked that he is trying to commodify his children but it was perhaps not so shocking in the court of Henry VIII which was all about power. And power is very human. Horrible Histories have done a brilliant job of bringing Henry VIII alive and we all remember his wives and how he beheaded two of them and how he worked his way through them at a rate of knots, but the facts are so much more complex than that. He was very conscious of his mortal soul.”

With Thomas Boleyn too, it was complex: “There is a struggle with his conscience. It makes it more interesting dramatically to have a struggle than to just have this character as conscience free as he uses his children, but what makes it interesting is when the children resist. You've got these three brilliant siblings who care for each other deeply but are hugely competitive in this great machine of power.”