Saw this last night and LOVED it!
Lydia Higman, who is a historian who can play the guitar, plays herself as a historian who plays a guitar, rocking rock music with resonant reverb and strumming folk with feeling, all while telling a compelling little known historical story.
She's the most fun teacher since Robin Williams in "Dead Poets Society," and he wasn't real.
And she's joined by a folk singing threesome of actors, who, through youthful, studenty, genuinely clever and joyous mucking about, tell an original story about an English witchcraft trial in a way that makes it feel ever so meaningful.
Some spoilers follow. . .
This is a real story about a witch trial in England, what happened before and what happened after, to the extent that it's known.
We enter the Royal Court Upstairs to a continuous loop of screen clips of football violence, historical and recent, with last year's Atherstone Ball game, which devolved into mob violence outside a William Hill, the most prominent of the video clips.
This sets up a status quo mood of ultraviolence as the play begins, and the historian and narrator of the play, Lydia Higman introduces us to the villain of the piece, Brian Gunter, uber-wealthy landowner with an ultra-violent soul, but with all the best words and remarkably good at rallying folks onside.
I can't possibly spoil how Gunter, played with sociable menace by Hannah Jarrett-Scott (Bingley and Charlotte Lucas in the West End's "Pride and Prejudice Sort of") gets into the position of accusing someone of illegally bewitching his daughter, Anne, but he does, and he's "The Crucible" level committed and scary about it.
As Anne, the daughter who says she's bewitched, Norah Lopez Holden (a terrific Ophelia to Cush Jumbo's "Hamlet,") is the secret ingredient that lifts this scatty history story from good to great (eat your heart out, Horrible Histories, I think this is more fun). Lopez Holden is at times wild and uncontrolled, mischievous and wicked, but also pained and sympathetic, like a winged and caged bird.
While Lopez Holden and Jarrett-Scott do the heavy lifting in the acting stakes, Julia Grogan, as the accused "witch," is also incredibly free and funny in her performance, and together with Higman, actually created this piece. She has a Sarah Hadland comic vibe (think Miranda Hart constantly humiliating the diminutive but endlessly resilient Hadland in the sitcom, Miranda) about her, someone who can be comically humiliated and equally comically resilient. She's especially funny running about with an animal head covering her face lol.
The storytelling veers from such super silly comedy to ultra freaky horror to documentary like accuracy with facts projected on a screen, all powered by propulsive rock and ethereal folk.
Its like everything in the play is at war with everything else: folk versus rock, men versus women, father versus daughter, silliness versus seriousness, accuser versus accused, liberation versus imprisonment, and in the anything-goes chaos, a resonant true story is brilliantly and originally told.
The overall feel is of music and facts raucously melding with something very studenty and silly to make seriously original fascinating theatre.
One savage wit at my performance said it was "the best play about witches [he'd seen] all day." I guess it's the studenty silliness that wasn't to his taste. But I felt it was one of the best and most fun plays about witches I've ever seen. 4 and a half stars from me.
