As Costume Designer: Double Murder (Hofesh Shechter Company); Voices and Light Footsteps; Chacony (Richard Alston Dance Company); The Waiting Game (Ballet Black); The Snow Queen; Hansel and Gretel; Alice in Winterland (Rose Theatre Kingston); Frankenstein (Aquilla Theatre). She hires Agnes, a woman suspected of being a witch by her gossiping neighbours, and instructs her to bewitch her brother into doing his duty by his wife.

Women, Beware the Devil at the Almeida review: a wild

Nearly 20 years ago, against the odds, he put on Paradise Lost in Northampton, and made it luscious.If Arthur Miller (often irked when the humour in his plays was overlooked) had decided to use witchcraft merely as the basis for a comedy with elements of magical realism, he might have written something like this beguiling new play. What’s it like to be in a bad play, one that is reviewed terribly and still have to go on every night? She’s the author of new play Women, Beware the Devil, which will bring sex, violence and black magic to the Almeida Theatre. This deadly new play is a “sinfully wild experience” ( WhatsOnStage) by “bold and brilliant playwright” ( The Guardian) Lulu Raczka ( Antigone).

woman Shirley Valentine Sheridan Smith is a transcendent one-woman Shirley Valentine

Elizabeth seeks to keep things as they are, but she has no real social status – it’s perhaps inevitable that she turns to the dark side to secure the house, because society isn’t going to do it for her.I’d love to add this work to that corpus of achievement but I found myself ultimately more bothered and bewildered than bewitched by a play which starts with tremendous dazzle but slowly goes up in smoke. I was a year late handing in my play – everyone at the Almeida was very annoyed about it,” she explains, a little rueful. It very much leans into the campness of the Jacobean revenge thriller – the name is an obvious allusion to Middleton’s ‘Women Beware Women’– but is frequently overtly comic, with copious knowing fourth-wall-breaking and a magnificently silly performance from Bill as Edward, the beef-obsessed, responsibility-resistant product of generations of inbreeding.

The week in theatre: Women, Beware the Devil; Romeo and Julie

tonally, Raczka’s writing is haywire, muddling modern vernacular with more ornate cod-historical language, deadpan jokes draining the action of every last drop of tension. Plenty of chewy, gristly morsels float briefly to the surface in Raczka’s bubbling cauldron, before disappearing back into its overheated soup of ideas. Leo Bill as Edward, and Ioanna Kimbook as the browbeaten Catherine, have the least sympathetic roles, but they still claim the space convincingly as their own whenever they are on stage. But the age of the witchfinder ended, pretty much, a generation earlier, and the world of the play is now trembling on the edge of a philosophical revolution which will banish superstition (and witches) for good. Premium Digital includes access to our premier business column, Lex, as well as 15 curated newsletters covering key business themes with original, in-depth reporting.She is the de facto mistress of her elegant family pile, living there with her dissolute brother Edward – a scene-stealing turn from Leo Bill as a dim, snobbish, reactionarily conservative toff. It begs an interesting question: given that the text is so quick to capitulate between feminist-tinged black humour and serious meditation on gender politics one cannot help but wonder whether a female director would have been better suited to execute it. What begins as a spin on The Crucible, with Puritan hysteria and hearsay along with rumblings of the civil war of 1642, goes off in strange directions. Oozing lurid imagery, it has a certain appealing, audacious swagger, thanks in no small part to a sumptuous production by Rupert Goold.