Though schematic, Kimberley Belflower’s Broadway hit, a punchy riposte to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, is a terrific piece of provocative entertainment. It uses the model of the high school comedy (think Glee, which Belflower namechecks) to expose contemporary parallels with the often-unaddressed issue of consent and sexual assault in Miller’s revered classic.
It has five rare foreground roles for young women, four of them strong: in Danya Taymor’s British premiere, Sadie Soverall and Miya James give standout performances. This is a thrilling addition to the 70th anniversary season of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court, which mounted the first British production of The Crucible in 1956.
Here, we’re in rural Georgia, where lively young educator Carter Smith (Dónal Finn) is teaching sex education by rote to a class of 16-year-olds: he’s covering this along with literature and drama following department cuts, one of several digs by Belflower at the dysfunction of the US school system.
Liberal, sensitive, supportive, and a committed Baptist, he’s “like the teacher in an inspirational movie”. And he’s raring to get them going on his favourite play, Miller’s indictment of McCarthyism through the story of the Salem Witch Trials. Several of the girls fancy him or feel a kinship with him. Uh-oh…
The female students are archetypes: the nerd; the hot girl; the preacher’s daughter; the sophisticated blow-in from the big city. The two boys are lamebrain jocks. But the characters are given vivid life by Taymor’s young cast, individually and collectively, as they test the boundaries of friendship and sexual attraction on the verge of adulthood.
Some of the girls quote Joan Didion, but they also fangirl over Harry Styles and the Twilight movies. And the process of maturity is complicated in a small town that’s almost as badly priest-ridden as Miller’s Salem. Not to mention the Trumpian backlash against progressivism. The girls are forced to accept (reluctant) boys in their feminism club in the name of “fairness”.
Slowly a darkness intrudes on the teenage chuntering. Raelynn (Miya James), the minister’s devoutly chaste daughter, broke up with Lee (Charlie Borg), her boyfriend of seven years, after he slept with her best friend Shelby, who subsequently went missing from school for three months. Lee aggressively tries to win Rae back and persuade her to go all the way, using his jealousy as a weapon. Typical, toxic man.
Ivy - the least well drawn of the girls but played with coltish effervescence by Clare Hughes – has a handsy dad. Bookworm Beth (Holly Howden Gilchrist, very funny) exchanges texts with Mr Smith. Lauryn Ajufo’s well-observed Nell, recently arrived from Atlanta, has a city girl’s beady reserve: but she’s actually “super not cool” and goes giddy when himbo Mason (Reece Braddock) exhibits brief moments of not-total-dickishness.
Sadie Soverall’s Shelby gets a big, foreshadowed build-up and she doesn’t disappoint as a gawky, vulnerable but supersmart child-woman who levels an accusation at an adult and finds herself labelled the “town tramp”. The part was played on Broadway by her near namesake and lookalike Sadie Sink, which suggests there’s some sort of nominative casting clause in the contract. Soverall was magnificent in the Donmar’s Cherry Orchard in 2024 and she lights up the stage here.
Though the play is mechanical in the way it works through #MeToo issues, with some scenes straining credibility, Belflower is acute on the way women and girls are manipulated and gaslit. And on victim-blaming and the excuses people make for predators. “My dad didn’t, like, rape her!” Ivy says of her dad’s accuser. The recasting of the “witch hunt” of The Crucible as way to silence and control women is cleverly done.
And you’ve got to love a play that includes a primal scream session brought on by the utterance of the word “penis”, a scene where two girls reconcile by laughing together to the point of exhaustion, and interpretative teenage choreography to Lorde’s Green Light. Metaphorically at least, men are still trying to stop women dancing.
Royal Court Theatre, to April 25; royalcourttheatre.com
