Childhood’s end… The Good John Proctor, Jermyn Street Theatre

I never thought you but a good man, John, only somewhat bewildered…

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

‘Tis the season for hunting witches, when is it ever not? Evil is everywhere, as the young women featured in Talene Monahon’s play keep on repeating and yet here it’s an obscure thing only dimly conceived in the minds of children in what amounts to a prequel to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Monahon’s script cleverly avoids all obvious allusions with only passing references made to modern witchery made in a discourse conducted in the modern idioms of a high school friends.

The characters are some of the women who make the fateful accusations in Miller’s play and they have been taken back to the actuality of their youth, Abigail Williams in The Crucible is 17 but here she’s played as 12 by the excellent Anna Fordham and her cousin and best friend Betty Parris, played with child-like nuance by Sabrina Wu, is just nine. This is the age they were when in 1692 they made their accusations against over two dozen of their fellow villagers in Salem including the good John Proctor.

The story takes place largely in the year before the witch trials and begins in the bedroom of the cousins as Betty relates a dream she’s had about flying through the woods, “like an owl” an exhilarating dream of freedom that her cousin advises her not to relate. Keeping a secret is difficult for a nine-year-old but Abigail knows already that accusations of witchcraft are all to easily made.

Sabrina Wu and Anna Fordham - all photographs by Jack Sain

Their friend Mercy Lewis (the vibrant Amber Sylvia Edwards) is 14 and knows all about the world including the fact that it is full of evil and, seemingly, large numbers of her fellow citizens are in congress with The Devil even though they still go to church the next day as if the rather florid descriptions of Old Nick worship she presents should leave them exhausted. Where has she learned all these lurid rumours? The play seems in no doubt about the corruption of these innocents. 

Abigail gets a job with the Proctor family much to her cousin’s despair - why are all the people we love dead or working? – and she becomes dazzled by her employer, as good a man as she has ever met. But her childish view of his benevolence soon gives us hints of a darker relationship that adds unwelcome depth to the evils of the original play. She has a child’s conception even of this though and either cannot nor will not express her treatment in direct terms. This is the skill of the playwright; understatements serve to highlight the sins of this new world were none stay innocent for long.

Sabrina Wu and Amber Sylvia Edwards, photo by Jack Sain

A new party arrives from Maine, and another without living parents – only Betty’s remain alive or present – Mary Warren (Lydia Larson) who at 18 has seen more of life as can be quickly seen. Lydia Larson is quite remarkable as the sensitive Mary giving the most febrile of performances, her eyes and face alive with meaning and the overwhelming wonder her character finds in the world in general and the woods in particular. Mary has fits when her imagination runs too wild but Lydia presents this lightning potential at all points, as thoughts flicker across her face in contrapuntal flow to her dialogue.

This is one of the wonders of the Jermyn Street Theatre, even with my eyesight you can see the performers at work and this breaks down the barriers you might find up in the expensive Gods of the West End giants round the corner. 

So, it is we see in close quarter how the girls’ exploitation and confusion leads to their seeking even the most outlandish explanations for their helplessness: what good is rationality when you are orphaned and abused. But the play lets us make our own minds up and doesn’t proscribe specific causality just the probabilities of society’s most vulnerable. The evil is throughout society and it is other people.

Anna Ryder's direction allows her performers free rein even as they are tightly choreographed across every inch of the stage.  The soundscaping from Bella Kear has a narrative atmosphere all its own and the lighting design from Laura Howard is superb transforming the JST’s discrete performance space from puritan loft to the deep disorientation of the woods and a quite astonishing moment when the focus shifts from stage to stalls.

Lydia Larson, detail from photo by Jack Sain

IThankYou Theatre Rating: ****

 This is a magical-realist, visceral delight that, literally, turns the spotlight on the audience in terms of our judgement and responsibility to these characters and young people like them. Who makes the “witches”, well, we do, and people very much like us if we’re not very careful. 

The play is being staged as part of the Jermyn Street Theatre’s Footprints Festival and runs from 10^th – 27th January, so I suggest you get your booking in quick. 

Full details of tickets and the rest of the Footprints productions are on the JST website.

I actually can’t believe how wicked this town has become.

Incidentally, my favourite performance of John Proctor came from Tom Wilkinson at the National Theatre in 1990. He was a powerful presence on stage and on screen and it is him I always think of when I think of The Crucible. RIP.