Writer and Director: Nelma Vapaa-Jää
“He was the most handsome man I’d ever seen”: funny how so many stories about the terrible things that happen to women begin this way. This is Abigail Williams’ story, a character Arthur Miller led us to believe is a silly, hysterical girl who may be involved with witchcraft in his most enduringly famous play, The Crucible. But writer and performer Nelma Vapaa-Jää sees things a little differently, expanding Abigail’s origin story in this eponymously titled new work, taken from a small reference to a relationship she had with John Proctor, to examine sexual abuse and the value of a woman’s word.
Set in the months before The Crucible takes place, Abigail, as a maid and helper to John Proctor’s wife, living in and learning to support his family. makes her confession, But John’s interest in her expands beyond the domestic, and while his wife is recovering from a difficult birth, his interest in Abigail grows until a physical as well as a moral boundary is crossed.
Vapaa-Jää’s play Abigail runs for less than 20 minutes but certainly delivers both insightful characterisation and revealing insight in a classic, well-known play with a strong message about the cycle of abusive behaviours directed from older men towards vulnerable young women they deliberately choose. That feeling of powerlessness, of being disarmed, is well explained as Vapaa-Jää outlines a fairly typical cycle of escalating behaviours in which John begins with compliments and the seventeenth-century equivalent of “my wife doesn’t understand me,” and moves on to kissing, complimenting Abigail’s beauty and intelligence before regularly visiting her room, insisting on secrecy.
The consequences of this are also thoughtfully considered with an underdeveloped hint of self-harm returning control over her own body and its experiences, while the writer includes some voiceover statistics on rape and sexual assault as part of her exploration of shaming and blaming women’s sexuality for the things that happen to them through time. As this very short play ends, Abigail’s range of emotions boil into an anger and desire for revenge, taking the audience and the character to the start of Miller’s play and Abigail’s plan to avenge herself one way or another.
There is so much here that can be expanded into a fuller piece and notwithstanding the strong material that exists already, Vapaa-Jää could tell us more about Abigail’s early life, perhaps stories of how a beautiful young women is sexualised by the men of the village through their leers and comments long before she is of age, or an attraction to Proctor that facilitated her introduction to his household. This could show, perhaps even more candidly, the ways in which the bodies of young women are taken from them before they are mature enough to understand these male responses.
There are many directions this can go in, but there is strong work here in developing this affecting companion piece to The Crucible, and one which makes Abigail’s actions in Miller’s play all the more believable.
Reviewed on 9 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
