Hampton Court’s year long celebration of the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession is about to come to life with the first of two theatrical events being staged at the historic palace next week.

A Little Neck, a specially devised site specific performance will take over the palace in September but first up, The Play of the Weather, written in 1532, is being performed in the Great Hall on Thursday and Saturday.

Historic Royal Palaces are the driving force behind these theatre projects and Tom Betteridge, theatrical advisor for the independent charity and a professor of English and drama at Oxford Brookes University, says The Play of the Weather will give audiences the chance to learn about a different side to Henry VIII.

“People think of Henry’s court as formal and organised but when you look at it through the prism of drama you see a very different court,” he says. “It was was formal but it also had another side to it that you can’t really get out of the art or the architecture.

“It’s easy to think of Henry as a tyrant and he was - he was an awful man - but people still had fun in his court. The Play of the Weather is bawdy and funny.”

The play’s author John Heywood was a member of Henry’s court who wrote and staged many plays for the King, and Betteridge says that as well giving modern audiences an insight into courtly life, the play, in which Jupiter arrives on earth to resolve a dispute about the weather, also reveals much about Henry’s stance on religion and his marital affairs.

“There is a weird speech that comes out of nowhere,” explains Betteridge. “One of the characters, Merry Report, says Jupiter is too busy to see anyone because he is making a new moon as he doesn’t like the old one. The old moon is Catherine of Aragon and the new moon represents Anne Boleyn.

“The play was written in Christmas 1532 around the time he married Anne in secret, but Henry is not divorced until March 1533, so the speech is letting the court know Catherine is on her way out and Anne is on her way in.”

Although the play was not performed in the Great Hall in 1532 because the building had yet to be completed, Betteridge believes staging the play there in 2009 is a valuable historical exercise that will bring new visitors to Hampton Court.

However, the production, directed by the RSC’s Gregory Thompson, stops short of faithfully recreating an authentic Tudor performance. While the setting is the real thing and costumes are copied from Tudor drawings, the decision has been taken to not stick slavishly to historical accuracy - with the best reason being that little is known about how the plays were staged and performed.

“The production is more of a hypothesis - this is a way it could have been done,” adds Betteridge. “Choosing an acting style is fraught, for example. There is an argument to say it would have been very extreme like in silent films but I don ‘t believe that as the play is a complex piece of writing.

“Why put all that effort into the words if you didn’t want to act in a way that would make them understandable?”

The Play of the Weather, Hampton Court Palace, August 6 and 8, 7pm, £22, for more information and to book tickets, call 0844 482 7795 or visit hrp.org.uk/hamptoncourtpalace