Lady Jane Grey is recorded in history as a tragic failed claimant to the English throne, but her contemporaries knew her also for her formidable education. Her cousin, Lady Jane Lumley, was a woman of letters too, penning noted translations of classic texts from Latin and Greek into English. This original play by Jennifer Grober imagines how these two young women’s lives might have intertwined, picturing a childhood friendship both tested and strengthened by Jane Grey’s ascent towards the throne.

It’s a stylish production, with white drapes and white dresses hinting at connections to the classical world. We first meet Jane Lumley, played by Grober, when she’s just eight years old – and already exploring her father’s library. Grober plays the childhood Lumley especially well, with a hint of immaturity peeking through the precocious exterior, and Anne Whitaker is similarly convincing as the intense and determined Jane Grey. Madeline Jane Joyce completes the cast as “Chorus”, another nod to classical form.

The play works best as a coming-of-age story, where the two Janes compete as children, form a bond as adolescents, then as teenagers are prised apart by political forces they cannot hope to control. Religion looms large – Lumley’s a Catholic, Grey famously a Protestant – but this is primarily a personal tale, of how Grey is first Lumley’s protégé, then her equal, and then briefly comes to eclipse her.

But, like many playwrights who have truly studied their subject, Grober overestimates how much we’ll already know and how quickly we can take new information in. There’s a lot of familial intrigue to Jane Grey’s story – and if you aren’t already aware that Guildford is the same as Dudley, or exactly what role Northumberland plays in it all, you might struggle to follow along. Even the words of the title, a crucial and contested alteration scrawled on the dying Edward VI’s will, aren’t actually referenced in the script.

Similarly, we hear a significant extract from Jane Lumley’s translation of Iphigenia at Aulis, but I only know that because I scribbled down enough words to Google later on. The parallels between the machinations of the English court and the myths of Ancient Greece are interesting, but jarring in a play that otherwise emphasises the dominant role of Christian piety. It feels like Grober’s tried both to tell Jane Grey’s story and to celebrate Jane Lumley’s now-forgotten talent, and ended up not quite conveying either.

Yet the script does pose intriguing questions, and gives us a starting-point to research more at home. / And Her is enjoyable to watch, but has a fearsome intellectual hinterland; and the more you learn about Grey and Lumley, the more you feel they would both have approved.