BEFORE THE SALEM TERROR
This week, to little acclaim, the Ambassadors opened Tbe Enfield Haunting, a play centred on the spooky hysteria of troubled teenage women.. The following day and simply the opposite facet of Chinatown , the little Jermyn provided us this odder, extra critical and gripping play about…sure, the spooky hysteria of teenage women.
Talene Monahan’s 90-minute play for 4 younger ladies is a prequel to Miller’s The Crucible (brilliantly performed final yr by the NT and nonetheless streaming). Set in 1691, the yr earlier than the explosion of witch-hunting and hangings in Salem, Massachussetts, it reveals 4 of the women who grew to become accusers. Natalie Johnson’s set evokes that chilly, exhausting, remoted Puritan life : because it opens Betty (Sabrina Wu) and Abigail (Anna Fordham) are seen in a sequence of fragmentary scenes – huddled on inheritor shared mattress, churning butter, wincing from a beating after saying some forbidden phrase or, endearingly, appearing out childlike position play about King and a peasant.
Abigail, at fourteen, is happy along with her first job working for John Proctor, and has a burning need to develop up and work like a person, open air and away from the stifling ladies’s-work indoors. Their pal Mercy (a strong Amber Sylvia Edwards): has a restlessly filthy thoughts, to the origins of which we get a clue later, and affords details about the motherless Abigail’s new month-to-month bleed, however all tousled with fantasies about Lucifer and detailedly bodily Satanic nightly visitations: “this town is infected with lust”. Witches, she additionally assures us, have translucent cats.
The combination of adolescent absurdity, repression and religiosity is cunningly written; the language vigorous and trendy and actual, regardless of references to group members as “Saints” . Abigail loves her new job, the physicality and pleasure of serving to within the calving and falling for “the good man” John Proctor, husbamd of an ailing spouse. But because the Crucible will later inform us, she is sacked for this relationship, and resents it.
The fourth determine of their claustrophobic world of awakening sexual exciteent and need to fly by means of the forbidden woods is Mary Warren, a newcomer and given to seizures (Lydia Larson). There is a wild denouement with lanterns within the woods, and the massive catastrophe of Salem awaits. A remaining coda, some time later, has Betty trying again unhappily at what happene.
A couple of passages might be tightened, however the interaction between the 4 women is riveting, recognizable and intelligently alarming. Like Joanna Carrick’s current and sensible UNGODLY and The Crucible itself, it holds between the strains truths for each age about repression, superstitious fanaticism, and the unbalances of youth . Another fascinating Jermyn St discovery.
jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 27 January
