With a talented all-female cast, writing and creative team, it wears its feminist credentials on its sleeve – blending rousing songs with some earth mother woo woo to transform a dispiriting chapter in women’s history into something more empowering.
But despite strong performances from musical theatre veterans, the women of all classes and ages awaiting trial in a Pendle prison cell are too sketchily drawn – and writers Rebecca Brewer and Daisy Chute should have been persuaded to part with some of their numbers to avoid thematic repetition.
But there is much to enjoy in their darkly humorous take on the contortions of church and state to condemn these outsider women as devil worshippers.
They are all based on the scant details from real court records – a midwife and abortionist, a herbalist, a mother and daughter who contested the fencing of common land, and a barren wife who gave birth to a dead baby.
Into the cell comes Jenet (Gabrielle Brooks) who as a child denounced her own family as witches and now stands accused herself.
It’s her journey to recover the memory of how she became a child witness that is the driver of Miranda Cromwell’s production – along with her cell mates’ resistance to the divide-and-rule patriarchy that demands a confession to save a life.
Brookes (Get Up, Stand Up) is in fine voice as the conflicted Jenet in numbers like Burn Our Bodies: “You’ll burn our bodies but we’ll burn down your society.”
And Lauryn Redding (Standing at the Sky’s Edge) is the the feisty survivor of sexual violence who finds unexpected joy in motherhood.
Allyson Ava-Brown (Hamilton) has one of the night’s most memorable numbers in Care, an anthem to the sisterhood. And Shiloh Coke is the wealthy woman who belatedly realises that misogyny trumps class.
The score sways from gospel to folk to a comic rap and soulful lament, and the tone shifts too – sometimes uneasily from levity to tragedy – with cast members playing hilariously awful male figures from a judge, to a Puritan groomer, a boy witness to a pox-ridden gaoler.
But it’s refreshing to hear a strong cast raise their voices in anger and sorrow at this historic injustice.
Coven runs at Kiln Theatre Kilburn until January 17.
