‘It does not matter what is true,” a teenager tells us after giving a testimony of witchcraft against a group of women including her own mother. What matters, she says, is “what is written down”. It is advice passed down to Rebecca (Lucy Mangan) by her indomitable mother, Anne (Gina Isaac), in this whiplash of a play, adapted by Ava Pickett from AK Blakemore’s award-winning 2021 novel. What was written down in the real case of the Manningtree witch trials of 1645 is minimal when it comes to the Essex women convicted and hung for devilry by Matthew Hopkins, a self-styled “witchfinder general”.
Five women targeted by him jointly narrate here with the primary focus on Rebecca, a clever, beady-eyed observer who tells of how Hopkins (Sam Mitchell) enters the town as an inn-keeper but soon reveals his purpose, with sermons and fearmongering in church.
He is a watchful figure in black, like a Puritan version of the Lone Ranger, and the women he suspects are overwhelmingly poor or widowed, their husbands or sons dead as a result of the civil war raging across the land.
We see events through Rebecca’s eyes and her monologues make apparent that this is a story of teen sexual awakenings in a climate of heated misogyny. It plays out in period dress but feels in spirit like Margaret Atwood’s dystopian Gilead.
Pickett’s adaptation preserves much of Blakemore’s lyricism, also reflected in Sara Perks’ arresting set design which has a central staircase, floodlights and a swarm of black in the backdrop from which characters appear and disappear. The production is reminiscent of Pickett’s Tudor play 1536 but the finger-pointing, more than a century later, is far more febrile. Under Natasha Rickman’s fabulous direction, the foreboding is cranked up from the first scene (Elena Peña’s sound design and Nicola T Chang’s compositions add nerviness), but it is not stark, in spite of its subject matter.
Like 1536, the play is as funny, profane and bolshie as the women at its centre, and in some ways, it is as much a mother-daughter love story as an account of the witch-trials. Hopkins retains a chilling vacancy, his intentions unknown beyond the 20 shillings he gets in every town for his work.
There are stunning performances, especially by Mangan, who is full of sharp tics and has a superb, sultry physicality (movement direction by Scott Graham, from Frantic Assembly). Isaac is excellent too, bearing a rebellious swagger worthy of a pirate and refusing to be defined as a victim. Pickett makes us see that these women were more than that, and certainly much more than what was written (or not) about them.
• At Mercury theatre, Colchester, until 14 March
