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Six sets out to rescue Henry VIII’s wives from the story that reduced them to six marriages, six scandals and a memorable rhyme. The sextet take to the stage with their live band of “Ladies in Waiting”, turning divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived into a pop concert and a competition over who suffered most. A show born at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017 has now returned to the city’s Festival Theatre after West End, Broadway and countless rounds of international applause.

“Remember us from your GCSEs?” asks the show, about to give familiar history a makeover. Anne Boleyn’s marriage becomes a social-media dating disaster and “House of Holbein” throws Anne of Cleves somewhere between German oompah and Eurostyle-EDM, complete with fluorescent ruffs and neon shades – rather a shame no lederhosen was sourced. The choreography is relentless, and the girl-pop identities give each queen her own musical language. Izi Maxwell catches Boleyn’s frivolity and bite; Hannah Victoria has the most outlandish material. Many of the show’s younger audience will already know these songs from TikTok and social media reels, making the stories they carry all the more likely to stick.

The concert atmosphere comes from the performers: the band, the choreography, the constant movement between the six. The stage itself barely changes, which is a missed opportunity in the Festival Theatre, where a production built around the energy and visual language of a pop concert could do much more with its surroundings.

Lizzie Emery gives Katherine Howard the punk-pop treatment, heavy on sexual innuendo but weaker on the higher notes. Laura Dawkes takes Jane Seymour in the opposite direction, giving her a soulful, subdued number. Both songs fit the pop-concert formula, but they also expose its limits: however differently the queens are packaged, the evening keeps circling back to the same competition over whose abuse was the most stark.

Then Catherine Parr asks the question the show has been edging around all night: why should these women be defined by the men they suffered at the hands of? “This Is the Remix” arrives with the apparent answer. It is the show’s attempt to step outside the story it has spent the previous 75 minutes retelling.

And that is the irony of Six. Its brightest songs are also the ones most likely to send “divorced, beheaded, died” home with the audience. The history it wants to escape is the history it has made irresistible.

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