Holy s**t. I’ve seen a fair bit of theatre in my time, mostly forgotten, but the greats will never be. The inaugural meeting of the We Three Bookclub happened this week (and yes, my friends, I’ve adopted that name without consulting either of you, who do I think I am etc 😂, but I like it.) - K had just come from seeing something in Wales which was wholly forgettable and we ranged among a million subjects other than Little Dorrit including how live performances can let themselves down; opera, musicals, theatre, we picked out the ones that will stay with us forever, mine Mark Rylance in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem and that would have remained my tippity-top if I hadn’t, on Friday night with L, seen John Proctor is the Villain. As I said, Holy S**t, and you can quote me on that.

The script - Kimberley Belflower take a bow, Take two bows. Take so many bows that you no longer know which way is up. To write with such fluency. To twist and turn a classroom, young voices, The Crucible from spring to torrent until nothing existed for us 389, full to capacity seated on our edge but the lit stage, the world of 2018 in Georgia and a young woman, believed. That final speech when it’s just Shelby and Raelynn had me losing time and space, had me finally understanding what it means to hang on every word; there was a moment when the actor, Miya James, had left the shores of the beginning of it but was no where near in sight of its end and she was free floating, flying on its sheer brilliant wings and I felt the ground drop away beneath me.

The idea - The Crucible unwrapped and unpacked, turned on its head, revealed for what it is, yet another applauding of a man for safeguarding his name. There’s a speech Shelby delivers to Carter about the fiction of his name as opposed to the fact of her body that nails the inequity and absurdity of this so perfectly I pray it finds its way onto every school curriculum.

The structure - when a writer pulls off that trick of stacking a narrative around a known play so that the story reveals itself in a looping hall of mirrors I can only sit back and wonder at the four-dimensional mind-bend of it. A classroom of students studying The Crucible, so far so simple, yet by the end these boundaries have been rewritten.

The final scene and its impact had me standing, and yes, I’ll admit it, crying my f*****g eyes out which never happens to me in a theatre except this time it did. Those girls, and Kimberley Belflower, spoke for all of us. I realise it’s sold out but if they ever run another production, get your hands on a ticket, pronto.

Before I sign off, it’s the launch of Fallout next week and I’m going to be live streaming the party so if you want to be virtually there, here’s the link.

Eleanor

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