THE WEST END’S MOST TIMELY REVIVAL: JOHN PROCTOR IS THE VILLAIN

By Lara Kennedy | LinkedIn ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | Press Invite

John Proctor is the Villain is a period piece, and not in the way you might expect. The period in question is 2018, small-town Georgia, at the precise cultural moment when #MeToo was at its loudest and a generation of teenage girls were being handed the vocabulary of feminism at exactly the same time they were discovering what had made it necessary. That collision is where Kimberly Belflower’s play is at its most alive, and it is very alive indeed.

The setup: a classroom of girls want to start a feminist club. Their English teacher, Mr Carter Smith (Dónal Finn), redirects it into something the school will actually sanction: open to boys, naturally. They are studying The Crucible. You will have already guessed the parallel. What you will not have guessed is how deftly Belflower makes you wait for it, and how much she wrings from the waiting.

The ensemble does the heavy lifting with considerable skill. Sadie Soverall’s Shelby is the standout, absent from the stage for long enough that her return genuinely lands, and her dynamic with Miya James’s Raelynn has the specific, painful texture of a friendship that has been broken but not yet admitted it. Holly Howden Gilchrist, Clare Hughes, and Lauryn Ajufo round out the girls with enough individuality that you never lose track of who is carrying what. Dónal Finn, meanwhile, plays charming with the practiced ease of someone who has always been told charm is enough. It is an unsettling and effective piece of casting.

Director Danya Taymor keeps the whole thing moving at a clip (under two hours, no interval) and the production is smart enough to know when to lean into its warmth and when to let it curdle. The musical interludes (Lorde, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé) are handled with enough affection to avoid feeling like wallpaper, though they do occasionally tip the first half into something more comfortable than the material deserves.

The play’s central argument that John Proctor, tragic hero of every GCSE syllabus in the English-speaking world, is in fact a grown man who exploited a teenage girl, is made with satisfying force. Where it wobbles slightly is in drawing too direct a line between Proctor’s moral complexity and Mr Smith’s considerably simpler predation. Proctor is a man of contradictions; Smith is not given the same latitude. The equivalence the play strains toward is the one place the writing feels less sure of itself than everything surrounding it.

The ending is an interpretive dance reimagining the witch-trial scenes, the predator still in the room, nothing resolved. It is both the right choice and, somehow, a fraction too neat. You feel the emotion. You also feel the dramaturgy.

The play is funny, it is sharp, and it is asking questions that feel considerably more pressing now than they did in 2018, which is either a tribute to Belflower’s prescience or a fairly damning comment on how little has changed. Probably both.

John Proctor Is The Villain is running at Royal Court Theatre until Saturday 25 April.

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Photo Credit: Camilla Greenwell