Coven – Kiln Theatre, London

Book: Rebecca Brewer

Music and Lyrics: Rebecca Brewer and Daisy Chute

Director: Miranda Cromwell

A couple of weeks late for Halloween, Rebecca Brewer and Daisy Chute’s new musical is set at the 1633 Pendle witch trials, making an impassioned case for the wrong done to scores of innocent women imprisoned and sentenced to painful deaths in an age of suspicion. Coven, an almost entirely female production excluding a single male dramaturg, comes with huge expectations, focusing on a group of ‘witches’ in a part of Lancashire with a particularly high prosecution rate, and the concept is full of possibility, yet this new musical fails to conjure enough dramatic momentum to give substance to its continuous female empowerment narrative.

When Jenet (Gabrielle Brooks) is held in prison accused of witchcraft, certain of her innocence, she fears the group of ‘real’ witches she shares her cell with (Shiloh Coke, Allyson Ava-Brown, Penny Layden and Lauryn Redding). Turning on one another, the women are convinced by a compromised guard Edmund (dressed like Les Misérables’ Javert from two centuries later) to betray each other, get confessions and win their freedom, until they realise they have a common enemy – the men who confine them. But Jenet is no stranger to witch trials, and she, too, must face her own culpability for events 17 years earlier.

Brewer and Chute’s musical has rather written itself into a corner and, in recycling the same pieces of information continually for 2.5 hours, doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, which results in narrative, tonal and musical confusion. Is it a sombre story of women caught in a world they cannot control, where their State-sanctioned murder results in the personal losses that Brewer includes? – the folksy numbers would suggest so, although these all expand into American country rather than British traditional songs. Is it a blazing female empowerment story designed to give voice and agency to history’s forgotten women, victims of misogyny and patriarchy? – the numerous anthems that pepper the second act certainly imply this, although Brewer and Chute choose not to end the night with any of them. Or is it a bawdy comic riot with plenty of modern language and panto characterisation? –  there is lots of this, too.

Coven’s problem is that it is all and none of these things, a mishmash of Sylvia, Hamilton and 1536, swirled into a musical that doesn’t work as well as any of its influences. Partly, it is too demanding, insisting the audience cares about its characters solely because they are falsely accused women without spending time building empathy for them as individuals and their story, actively earning the emotional investments it wants us to feel.

Coven is also fairly limited in its plot development; all the information about Jenet and the other women is revealed in Act One, Scene One, so the rest of the show is them either catching up or learning to accept themselves, but it leaves the audience nowhere to go. And please, no more jaunty numbers sung by British Kings inserted into musicals for no reason. James I may have written a book on witchcraft and demons, but it adds nothing to the story as a one-off solo, and he wasn’t even king in 1633.

Coven needs a rethink. There are some good vocals, but in character, book and songs, there needs to be greater consistency and a stronger purpose. If it wants to assume a contemporary style, then language and costume need to fully commit to the hybrid model; if it wants to be a sentimental tale of mothers and daughters, the it needs a more expansive consideration of the impact of witchcraft trials on families left behind, and if it wants to reposition the accused as heroes then deeper management of character investment and development is necessary to flesh out the atmosphere of danger and suspicion to create real jeopardy. The women of Pendle were real and just like us; Coven needs to give them a rounder life.

Runs until 17 January 2025