(seen at the afternoon performance on 15th November 2025)
While “Wicked” turned out brilliantly, there is a long line of musicals about witches that have proven disastrous. “Which Witch” and “The Witches of Eastwick” to name but two, and for those who remember, “Into The Woods” went unrecognised on its first London outing as well.
For the monkey “Coven” joins the list, and it sadly fears it beyond redemption.
Taking the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials as its theme, writers Rebecca Brewer and Daisy Chute abandon insanely the material on offer, rejecting a sense of period and place for their concept of modern feminism among the female victims of false allegations.
Set in Jasmine Swan’s passable gaol cell, with inexplicable moving balcony in the second half; a few benches and some lavender smelling smoke are all that are required to create a depressingly washed-out atmosphere.
With excruciatingly inexplicable student play direction by Miranda Cromwell, the cast are forced to behave like simple-minded pantomime villagers instead of the dignified wronged women that they are.
Brewer and Chute’s book advances mere millimetres over two and a half hours, telling us nothing except that the trials were rigged from the start, based on the unreliable evidence of bribed children.
Delivered by mixing modern dialogue and mores, we receive a scrambled mess of irrelevant and unrelatable half-stories and gain no insight whatsoever into a disgraceful historic miscarriage of justice.
Revealingly, Brewer and Chute demonstrate why they chose not to go down a properly creative route by inserting unnecessary, witless imitations of both “Hamilton” and “Six” into the piece. If either of them think they are capable of that level of sophisticated musical theatre success, they could be under a delusional spell.
The show long out stays its welcome, though does have the novelty of delaying our escape to show an irrelevant birthing scene in fairly graphic detail. Perhaps they were hoping for nuns on bicycles to arrive and enliven proceedings immeasurably?
In fairness, one late sequence with a puppet child is rather well done, and two songs, “Witch” and “Common Woman” land. The former with some much-needed humour, the latter suggesting the musical style which would have suited the entire show.
The cast survive with dignity intact, thanks to only being asked to participate in about two truly embarrassingly awful misfiring numbers.
Diana Vickers is under-used as gaoler, taking the trans role with dignity if not gravitas.
Gabrielle Brooks likewise holds her own as Jenet, resignation landing a small emotional punch.
In smaller roles, Rosalind Ford as King James and Penny Layden as a corrupt Judge add a little skill to proceedings.
Once out of rehearsals and in front of an audience, musicals often find themselves very different with the paying public observing them. The monkey knows that no writing team set out to create a weak show (and only Max Bialystock invests in one).
Still, this is a huge disappointment which feels irrecoverable. It wishes the creative team well for the future, and hopes they find a different project more in line with their desires to explore the modern world soon.
1 star.