Review: WOMEN, BEWARE THE DEVIL, Almeida Theatre

It looks like a Dutch interior painting with its tilted walls to garner forced perspective, sleek black wooden panels, and soft but vivid lighting. But Women, Beware the Devil is closer in tone to Hogarth than Vermeer. The latter exudes meditative stillness, this is cluttered with a cacophony of chaos, bawdy, brazen, and brash.

Desperate for an heir so that her family mansion will stay in the hands of her blue-blooded family, Elizabeth enlists Agnes, a serf suspected of being a witch, to work her magic to produce an heir for her oafish brother William.

Set in the build up to the English Civil War, on paper it sounds like a cross between Downton Abbey and The Crucible, but you'd be wrong. It's totally sui generis, a protean medley of restoration comedy, feminist melodrama, and Hammer House horror. Instagram meets pentagram. Lulu Raczka doesn't quite pull off everything she wants to, but it sure is a hoot to watch her throw everything at the wall.

Raczka's cavalier attitude bleeds into the nuts and bolts of the writing. Despite its setting its vernacular is contemporarily brisk and punchy. It takes anachronisms in its stride ramming full steam ahead thematically capitulating back and forth leaving its audience to catch up in its wake. It also doesn't care what you think. Its tone is unapologetically queasy.

The curated confusion is its greatest strength and its Achilles heel. Boisterous and barmy yes, but Raczka becomes her own worst enemy, unable to structure her themes. The sexual elements are especially awkward in the manner they are handled; feeling desperate to be more risqué than they are, over-spicing what is already a peppery plot with incest, self-harm, and a dead baby. It all eventually caves in. The foundations are visible amongst the rubble: in a clunky finale class conflict emerges as the play's true epicentre.

It's a little predictable especially with its overwritten characters. Take William, a moronic Blackadder-esque klutz, a laughing stock cavalier - he is straight out of the brunch cafes of Clapham with his airy toff accent and bird-like movement. His authority is propped up by nothing other than the fact he is a man, yet he is putty in the hands of Elizabeth and Agnes who wield sexual power over him.

The conniving Agnes (played by a dexterous Alison Oliver) eventually enters into a Faustian pact with the Devil (a suave omniscient Nathan Armarkwei-Laryea) to become William's wife and worm her way up the social hierarchy like a parasite. The mansion that an increasingly frantic Elizabeth is so keen to pass down her line is a thinly veiled metaphor for an aristocracy in existential crisis thanks to the Civil War knocking at the door.

Raczka is keen to draw political parallel between now and 1641's world of hysterical witch hunting and social revolution. There is a detectable whiff of Brecht about Armarkwei-Laryea's opening fourth wall breaking monologue where he directly addresses strikes and economic turmoil. But its politics is unable to blossom stifled by unstable direction that is too keen to impress.

Rupert Goold doesn't maintain his directorial grip on the script. 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. Just a thought.

Women, Beware the Devil runs at The Almeida Theatre until 25 March

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

To post a comment, you must register and login.