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
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