BEFORE THE SALEM TERROR
This week, to little acclaim, the Ambassadors opened Tbe Enfield Haunting, a play centred on the spooky hysteria of troubled teenage girls.. The following day and just the other side of Chinatown , the little Jermyn offered us this odder, more serious and gripping play about…yes, the spooky hysteria of teenage girls.
Talene Monahan’s 90-minute play for four young women is a prequel to Miller’s The Crucible (brilliantly done last year by the NT and still streaming). Set in 1691, the year before the explosion of witch-hunting and hangings in Salem, Massachussetts, it shows four of the girls who became accusers. Natalie Johnson’s set evokes that cold, hard, isolated Puritan life : as it opens Betty (Sabrina Wu) and Abigail (Anna Fordham) are seen in a series of fragmentary scenes – huddled on heir shared bed, churning butter, wincing from a beating after saying some forbidden word or, endearingly, acting out childlike role play about King and a peasant.
Abigail, at fourteen, is pleased with her first job working for John Proctor, and has a burning desire to grow up and work like a man, outdoors and away from the stifling women’s-work indoors. Their friend Mercy (a powerful Amber Sylvia Edwards): has a restlessly filthy mind, to the origins of which we get a clue later, and offers information about the motherless Abigail’s new monthly bleed, but all tangled up with fantasies about Lucifer and detailedly physical Satanic nightly visitations: “this town is infected with lust”. Witches, she also assures us, have translucent cats.
The mixture of adolescent absurdity, repression and religiosity is cunningly written; the language lively and modern and real, despite references to community members as “Saints” . Abigail loves her new job, the physicality and excitement of helping in the calving and falling for “the good man” John Proctor, husbamd of an ailing wife. But as the Crucible will later tell us, she is sacked for this relationship, and resents it.
The fourth figure in their claustrophobic world of awakening sexual exciteent and desire to fly through the forbidden woods is Mary Warren, a newcomer and given to seizures (Lydia Larson). There is a wild denouement with lanterns in the woods, and the big disaster of Salem awaits. A final coda, a while later, has Betty looking back unhappily at what happene.
A few passages could be tightened, but the interplay between the four girls is riveting, recognizable and intelligently alarming. Like Joanna Carrick’s recent and brilliant UNGODLY and The Crucible itself, it holds between the lines truths for every age about repression, superstitious fanaticism, and the unbalances of youth . Another fascinating Jermyn St discovery.
jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 27 January
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