Women, Beware the Devil (Modern Plays)

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Miriam Buether’s set is elegant and functional, a bare, panelled room in which appealingly laden dining tables are wheeled in from the wings and the much-maligned marital bed rises from the floor. Alison Oliver, casting off the trappings of her quiet debut in the BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, brings an animalistic energy to Agnes, a witch-turned-maid (and, eventually, turned Lady of the house). Yet, in spite of it all, there is something exhilarating about its disruptions, which seem deliberate.

Alison Oliver to star in ‘Women, Beware the Devil’ at the

He is bringing up his baby single-handed alongside his alcoholic mother: he is first seen wiping poo from the infant’s chubby folds. And her silk evening dress (costumes by Evie Gurney) is as resplendent as Elizabeth’s velvet and taffeta outfits.In a stately pile a clever servant girl, thought to be a witch, is one cause of disturbance: Alison Oliver cleverly makes her both vulnerable and toughened. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. That show was written by Sally Wainwright, who recently had the whole country gripped by the brilliant third series of Happy Valley. So there’s a certain amount of self-selection in the people who choose to study there, and a certain amount of theatre nerdiness. If it is a failure, it is a heroic one, performing the rare feat of leaving this critic impressed, exasperated but temporarily speechless.

Women, Beware the Devil review – bizarre comedy horror is

After a memorable turn in the BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s hit novel Conversations With Friends last year, rising star Alison Oliver plays Agnes, while simultaneously rehearsing for her role in the National Theatre’s forthcoming revival of Dancing at Lughnasa during the day. Lulu will also share insights into the process of writing Women, Beware the Devil, and its journey to the stage. The play opens with a direct address from the shape-shifting man of darkness (Nathan Armarkwei-Laryea) reading a tabloid, lamenting his former omnipresence whereas nowadays platitudes like ‘structural, systemic, never evil,’ are bandied about. In Miller’s The Crucibleor, on film, Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England(also set during the Civil War) and Robert Eggers The Witch, fear and horror actively fuel the themes.

Agnes’ enforced loyalty and avowals of piety are tested to destruction though; she covets the whole kit and caboodle, the better, it transpires, to raze it all, and, with more than a pricking of thumbs (there’s ample simulated blood-letting), gains fiendish, usurping powers. It uses events and attitudes from the 1640s to throw light on modern-day inequalities in wealth and gender, and on how revolutions devour themselves. So, Raczka does indeed locate her drama in the past, 1640, and the eve of the English Civil War, though her richly conceived, daring, larking, fascinating oddity of a play resonates strongly with a Britain which continues to be stymied by tradition, elitism and a monarchy that just won’t go away; while witchcraft and domestic power struggles dominate the action, the subtext is a dialectic between the impulses for revolution and the status quo that the country has never resolved.