Monthly Archives: November 2025

AN INNOCENCE OF WITCHES 

        A brand-new musical always stirs hope, especially when we’re promised  voices like Gabrielle Brooks (magnetically magnificent as Rita in Get Up Stand Up).   This storming woman-power show by Rebecca Brewer and Daisy Chute  has been selling out hard for weeks: its triumphantly rackety “You burn our bodies, but we’ll burn down your society” keeps popping up online(though believe me, until you see a chorus of condemned witches hurling it at you through a sheet of flame you haven’t trembled half enough, Mr Patriarchy). 

         Miranda Cromwell directs with ferocious pace, one number after another never overlong , each one pushing ahead with relentless storytelling energy.   Brewer and Chute seem to scorn the idea of getting pegged down in a musical genre,  and move between wild bluesy laments, a couple of touchingly folky songs with big dark drumbeats about the 17c commoners whose livelihood was stolen by enclosures,  and one purely riotous music-hall number. That latter one expresses envious male dread of penis-snatching witches who,  with pettish resentment,  the men feel “would rather fuck the devil than go to bed with you!” .  

        It’s about the 17th century Witch-hunts , which is right on trend, unsurprisingly considering our fresh-born tendency to harass one another about anything from Gaza to gende: cancelling is the modern curse  and  trolling our stake or gallows.    Apart from regular revivals of THE CRUCIBLE we have this year had the tense, personal, intimately brilliant THE UNGODLY (which travelled from Ipswich and Southwark to Brits-on-Broadway). and the more diffuse  A TRYAL OF WITCHES at Bury st Edmunds. Both were based on the East Anglian 17c trials. Now   it’s Lincolnshire for the famous Pendle witch-trials,   and like the others is well researched ,  imagining  victims  drawn from individual records.   At its its heart is  the authors’ discovery that in 1633  one Jenet (or Janet) Device was accused of witchcraft by a boy of eleven. Child witnesses were often used to point the finger at rural women who were poor, old, odd or simply adept at herbal medicine.  But then they found the same name, Janet Device, recorded 21 years earlier in 1612,  as a child witness whose testimony hanged her mother and sister.

        So they imagine, terrifyingly, the adult Jenet thrown into prison, meeting a group of fellow-victims, trying to believe that her child self told the truth,  struggling to declare her pious, religious innocence .  She learns their stories:  a midwife, a healer, a pregnant victim of a landowner, whose own wife had a stillbirth and was accused of bewitching the baby .  The language is modern (at one point the corrupt warder swings out with “Laters, you dirty old slags”) and at first that feels a bit Cell Block H predictable.  But deftly the stories and situations develop: Martha (an impressive Penny Layden) has signed her confession and is off to the gallows, hoping her pregnant daughter Rose (Lauryn Redding) can thus be freed.   Frances (Shiloh Coke with an immense, passionate, almost terrifying bluesy-belter voice) delivers a memorably enormous rage. At the core of it is Gabrielle Brooks as Jenet, who is superb,  but all the cast are very fine: some  becoming ensemble onstage musicians,  all radiating energy to power a city.   Not least when they suddenly become judges, lawyers or bearded clerics studying Malleus Malefictorum, the witchfinding manual, and opining that “when a woman thinks, alone, she thinks evil!”.   Rosalind Ford even neatly transforms for a few quick lines into  King James himself,  the chief enthusiast for witchfinding. As I say, director Cromwell keeps things moving. 

        The second half takes us  out of the prison and into the past,  as Jenet meets and watches a very good puppet of herself as a small child. She is in a poor common-farming family – the sense of healthy earthiness is lovely – but  is  being creepily groomed into giving her nonsensical evidence .  Puppetry direction is by Laura Cubitt (whose work I last saw making a 20ft-tall Hamlet’s Father convincing for Red Rose Chain).  The idea of this flashback, suitably hippie-witchy, is that the healer-midwife in the prison group has put Jenet into a trance so she can relive, and forgive, the terrible thing she did in denouncing her family.  It could be cheesy  but isn’t; we are by that time gripped,  men in the audience as spellbound as anyone, finally cheering manically at the great chorus.  The resolution of the women’s stories – grim for most, as it was in real life – is well handled: there’s defiance and hope and even humour.   There are good reasons this show is selling so fast.

www.kilntheatre.com   to 17 Jan.   

Rating 4

NOT AT ALL A DRAG…

Candy-coloured prettiness frames a 1890s world,  of bored girls in flounces longing for escape from guardians,  lovesick young men not averse to heiresses, and a powerful but problematical lady of mature years .No, not Oscar Wilde’s evergreen Earnest: this is the broader and once beloved contemporaneous comedy by Brandon Thomas.  Being a bit lower down the class scale – a city clerk –  he had even more reason to laugh at the idle rich.  So, desperate for a chaperone in order further their suits, in his original the lads get a male friend Fancourt Babberley to play Charley’s aunt from Brazil…

    Being in the vicinity and always up for the inventive Watermill, I was curious to see whether in our jntemperate age of gender-police, MtF drag  – bloke in a frock – could still be funny for its own sake.    Late to the party, as I ws away, but a week left of performances,  so felt it worth mentioning to anyone who can get to the Watermill and has a taste for not only half-forgotten cultural oddities but for reflection  – without the endemic hostilities and tantrums – on the notion of “queer theory” and its social history. 

    For Rob Madge – who wrote the engaging show My Son’s a Queer But  What Can You Do – has tweaked this Victorian joke with modern glee, changing the emphasis to make the girls the plotters , and Babberley their uncle’s butler.  In an estimable spirit of just having good fun, the adaptor offers plenty of other twists and gags, adds  exuberant 21c swearing, gen-Z fist bumps and jargon,  and knowing jokes on Victorians themselves. The four young people and their elders dart around with gleeful absurdity, and Max Gill  as Babbs plays it with a dragqueen dryness  which wars with the real feelings of a chap who only blossoms in costume and the mystery of gender-switch. Indeed the play ends with more than a nod to the i-am-what-I-am motto of La Cage Aux Folles, and sharp clear reference to what would really have awaited Babbs and the sex-adjusted paramour he finds in the denouement.

    But the point is that it’s fun, full of fine silliness alongside the undercurrent of lgbtq+ anger. They’re all exuberantly in it though a special mention to Yasemin Özdemir”s Kitty for top eyebrow ‘n ankle work.

      Looking up the play’s history I feel I should share with you that Charley’s Aunt was made in the Soviet Union in 1975,  in China in 2015, and that Indian versions like Moruchi Mavshi have been performed ever since 1947.  I would give quite a lot to see any of them , and work out how much queer-theory they relate it to…

watermill.org.uk  to 15 Nov

INNOCENCE, WICKEDNESS , RAGE

    Ti Green’s set is ,at first, a gilded wonder of dignified curves and arches, palatially spectacular when filled with the red robes of the Duke and senators.  But – as a pleasing surprise once the Cyprus war  begins – those  very curves and arches will shift , fly and veer to create a vigorous ballet of uncertainty and collapse against a stormy background. Their dignity gone: maybe a metaphor for what will happen to the Moor himself. 

       He of course is David Harewood, all man and all soldier. We meet him smart and assured,  hands behind his back and head  cocked intelligently as if at a military briefing ,  wholly confident during his arraignment by the senate and old Brabantio (the latter  amusingly emerges furious from a high box stage- left when Roderigo, puppet-run by Iago, wakes him with news of Desdemona’s elopement).    Harewood’s Othello is grippingly impressive,fluently passionate in his tale of how Desdemona had listened to his dangers and sufferings “and I loved her that she did pity them.”    He is laughing in his luck at winning her,  and Caitlin Fitzgerald, willowy and aristocratic , laughs with him in perfect accord like any happy girlfriend, young and naive and proudly thrilled to follow the drum. 

        It all feels fresh:  director Tom Morris has deliberately sets a tone of lightness and youth from the start, and the staging of the hard-partying soldiery – brawl and all – is brilliantly episodic as Iago orchestrates Cassio’s drunkenness with elegant deftness.   Luke Treadaway’s Cassio, healthily young and blithe,  is perfect to prefigure the later furious line from Iago about “the daily beauty in his life”. But the real wonder of this prdocution is Toby Jones’  Iago.   Shorter, stumpier than the leader he hates so much, the aggrieved lieutenant is a classical specimen of the guy who for all his efficiency has never been seen as star or leadership material,  and bitterly resents it.  We’ve all encountered him at work. But beneath that normality is an unsettlingly everyday evil:  his conspiratorial grins and asides to the audience beguile and repel at once. The process of his manoeuvres has an artful metronome accuracy, skilfully pushing every button on Othello’s insecurity: sexual ,racial, the need to be liked, his foreign-born sense of ‘otherness’ aggravated when Iago hints that Venetian women have a different attitude to fidelity.    And through all this first half of the play,   this awful process gets a remarkable number of audience laughs:   shocked ones perhaps, but fascinated by a masterclass in manipulation.

        That entertaining, deftly moving lightness makes the abrupt darkening of Othello, Harewood with small moves and tics expressing a fragility hidden before.  His seizure and the wild slap of his bride are properly unnerving.  Meanwhile Jones’ Iago assuredly roams the stage, his suggestiveness ever dirtier:  I had never quite appreciated how subtly Shakespeare does this,   prim moments early on coarsening to filth.     Harewood throws himself into Garrickian high-volume rant and rage, but his initial  individuality inevitably gets lost in the perennial and universal dreadfulness of violent male rage.  Maybe this is why the final murderous scenes are suddenly set beneath great lighting-rigs , as if to remind us of the dreadful familiarity of these irrational femicide  crime scenes .

       But Morris allows grace and room to the women in the play’s late wistful gentleness,  fragments of the willow song speaking for all victims of this familiar madness.   Fitzgerald gives heartrending incredulity to Desdemona’s final  bewilderment, hope,  and terror and Vinette Robinson is a superb Emilia:   spittingly magnificent in Shakespeare’s greatest expression of female defiance.   It stays with you for hours,  Iago haunting your dreams. As he should.

Trh.co.uk to 17 jan

rating 4