The Manningtree Witches review – Ava Beckett’s engaging follow-up to Tudor hit 1536 | stage

‘I“It doesn’t matter what’s true,” a teenager tells us after giving testimony about witchcraft against a group of women including her mother. What matters, she says, is “what is written.” It’s advice passed down to Rebecca (Lucy Mangan) from her indomitable mother, Anne (Gina Isaacs), in this play by Ava Beckett from A. K. Blackmore’s award-winning 2021 novel. What’s been written about in the true case of the Manningtree witch trials of 1645 is minimal when it comes to the Essex women who were convicted and hanged for the devil by Matthew Hopkins, who called himself “General Witch Finder.

Five women targeted by him are narrated here in common with the primary focus on Rebecca, an intelligent, beady-eyed observer who tells how Hopkins (Sam Mitchell) enters the city as an innkeeper but soon reveals his purpose, through sermons and fear-mongering in the church.

He is a watchful figure dressed in black, like a Puritan version of the Lone Ranger, and women he suspects are overwhelmingly poor or widowed, their husbands or sons dead as a result of the civil war raging across the country.

We see the events through Rebecca’s eyes and her monologues make it clear that this is a story of teenage sexual awakening in a climate of heated misogyny. It plays with period clothes but feels as soulful as Margaret Atwood’s dystopian film Gilead.

Beckett’s adaptation preserves much of Blackmore’s lyricism, which is also reflected in Sarah Birks’ attractive set design, which has a central staircase, spotlights and a swarm of black in the background from which characters appear and disappear. The production is reminiscent of Becket’s 1536 play Tudor, but the finger-pointing, more than a century later, is far more inflammatory. Under Natasha Rickman’s wonderful direction, the scares mount from the first scene (Elena Peña’s sound design and Nicola T. Chang’s compositions add nervousness), but it’s not stark, despite its subject matter.

Like the 1536 play, the play is as funny, profane, and poignant as the women at its center, and in some ways, it is as much a mother-daughter love story as it is a story of the witch trials. Hopkins holds a chilling vacancy, his intentions unknown beyond the twenty shillings he receives in each city for his work.

There are stunning performances, especially from Mangan, who is full of intense tics and has a great, sexy physicality (action direction by Scott Graham, of Frantic Assembly). Isaac is also excellent, carrying a rebellious swagger worthy of a pirate and refusing to be defined as a victim. Beckett makes us see that these women were more than that, certainly much more than what was written (or not written) about them.