Coven

Halloween is over but witches are still haunting the Kiln Theatre. Well, alleged witches, the victims of the 1633 Pendle Witch Trials whose half-known stories have been set to music by composers Rebecca Brewer and Daisy Chute. It’s a very rare thing: a brand new musical that isn’t based on an existing book or film, with an original score and, rarest of all in musical theatre, an entirely female cast and creative team. You can put it in a bracket with Sylvia and Six as a defiant feminist retelling of history, but it’s doing its own thing in a weird and interesting way.

The opening scenes – a little slow and dialogue-heavy, in need of an establishing banger – introduce us to Jenet Sellers, who once accused her whole family of witchcraft and has now been accused of the same thing herself 20 years later, locked up with other condemned women. These cellmates’ backstories (based on real people, by and large) are drip-fed in songs which fuse folk, protest song, anthemic pop and ritualistic spells.

Woven in amid the main story are ideas around common land, manipulation of children to give false evidence and the importance of community over divisive ideologies that lead us to denounce other people as, for example, witches.

One woman has been raped by the wealthy local landowner – Lauryn Redding brings great depth and bite and likability as the gobby Rose – while that landowner’s wife Frances is there, too, having just lost a baby; there's herbalist Maggie and midwife Nell, too. But the focus is Jenet, a typically brilliant and commanding Gabrielle Brooks whose priggishness gives way to vulnerability and whose voice is astonishing: you think you’ve heard the limits of her range, then she pulls out a belted high note seemingly from nowhere. That decent cast, though, is squeezed by a stage that stacks crooked steps up to a peak, leaving a very small playing area and some choreography that has no space for the necessary flinging of arms.

Musically the moods are many: a descending minor motif in the first few songs gives a Les Mis vibe, helped by the poor imprisoned people singing about being poor and imprisoned, and a darkly religious song seems to nod to Carrie the Musical. Some songs take a head-on approach, like staunch number ‘Care’ about women having control over their bodies ('for every woman everywhere, we will fight for our existence and for our right to care'), while others filter in more gently like the almost-final number about the erasure of women from history books which brings in a witchy elemental vibe: ‘you won’t find me in a book…you’ll find me in the air, you’ll find me where the water flows’.

Director Miranda Cromwell could do with evening out the tone that flicks from goofy to grave – a Horrible Histories vibe with false moustaches on the one hand and some moving moments of sisterly solidarity on the other – overplaying the comedy at the expense of building up emotional heft. But the second half settles and finds its purpose, with story and songs more integrated and a couple of really strong numbers, including one where Jenet denounces her family in a stuttering, incantatory way.

This is a musical very much in development. It reminded me of Benjamin Button in its first public iteration at Southwark Playhouse in 2018, the version where all the ideas are on display – including, like Benjamin Button, puppets – and ready to be made leaner and cleaner before, hopefully, another run.