The tunes and the powerful singing voices in this all-female folk-pop musical, which connects the infamous Pendle Witch Trials of 1612 to further proceedings two decades later, are fine. It’s the lyrics, the book and particularly Miranda Cromwell’s cumbersome direction that are the problem. At least until after the interval, when a sudden surge of creativity – including the eloquent deployment of a puppet – brings focus and force to the narrative.
But half of a good show isn’t good enough. Coven was conceived before the pandemic by actor and singer Rebecca Brewer and songwriter-musician-arranger Daisy Chute, and has moved through various iterations since. It still needs a lot of work.
Our protagonist is Jenet Device (pronounced “deviss” and played by the always-chameleonic, always captivating Gabrielle Brooks), accused of witchcraft in 1633, although bumptious faith is initially her only character trait. She finds herself in a cell with other women based on real figures from Pendle and other trials but presented, like her, as archetypal targets of male suspicion or anger.
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There’s the healer; the doula; the wife cast off when her child is stillborn; the young girl accused of conniving in her own rape and impregnation. They start off bickering and fighting but end up forged into a sort of feisty 17th century riot grrrl gang. Yay, go sisters! Except, you know, they are mostly still gonna die, and they’re all stuck with the patriarchy, which is still irksomely dominant today. Bummer, right?
Modern parlance clashes with historical period throughout, but in a ham-fisted act of foreshadowing rather than the clever juxtaposition it represented in Ava Pickett’s 1536 at the Almeida earlier this year, or in the likes of The Favourite and The Great on screen. “This isn’t witchcraft it’s healthcare!” declares herbalist Maggie. “Truth? Shmooth!” sneers a guard, the first in a long and tedious line of leery and overblown male caricatures. “The Lord creates life!” Jenet pompously informs her pregnant cellmate Rose (Lauryn Redding). “Shame ‘e’s never volunteered to babysit!” Rose snaps back.
There’s also some stuff in here about the enclosure of common land imposing capitalism on collaborative female communities and severing their connection to the soil (pretty sure it happened to men too). And the suggestion that Heinrich Kramer co-wrote the infamous witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum in 1486, heavily laced with castration anxiety, because he was dumped by his girlfriend. I didn’t have either subject on my 2025 musical-theatre bingo-card, but here we are.
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Brewer and Chute jointly wrote the music and lyrics and jointly lead the tight, six-strong band, while Brewer alone is responsible for the script. The score ranges widely and wildly, from the stirring protest anthems Common Woman and Burn our Bodies to the silly boyband pop-froth of Testimony of Edmund Robinson Jr, which deals with the use of child accusers in sorcery trials. Songs like Liminal I and Liminal II seem strung together from woo-woo phrases to imply something mystical and numinous about womanhood. There are altogether too many “witch/bitch/snitch” and “rage/cage” rhymes.
It's staged on Jasmine Swan’s set of stepped slabs by Cromwell, who seems to have taken her directorial cue from early Kate Bush videos for the women – lots of eerie Wiccan looming and eye-rolling - and from the Muppet Show for the men. The show is horribly coarse-grained, wooden and obvious in the first half, squandering the acting talents and the giant blues voices of Brooks and Shiloh Coke, and the diva stylings of Redding. Allyson Ava-Brown, Penny Layden and Jacinta Whyte also sing well.
Ironically, it takes the introduction of the puppet representing Jenet as a child (built by Oliver Hymans and directed by Laura Cubitt) to introduce subtlety to the characterisations. There’s the germ of something interesting here, about sorority and male attitudes to women, but right now it’s woefully, clumsily done.
To 17 Jan, kilntheatre.com.
