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...