Women, Beware The Devil by Lulu Raczka - Almeida

Hmm. Can't decide if I fancy this or not.

I did the same. Took about 10 minutes.

It is a bit late to put out the question because I am going to see it tonight, but has anyone seen it?
It is not the most romantic play for Valentine's Day but I thought that compared to the devil, I might look like a good catch :-)

You're not the only one who did not understand the point of the play. I haven't seen it but according to someone who went to see the first preview, apparently the set design is good and the performances are great but they left confused about the point of it all. I was not sure about seeing this play but looks like I may need to avoid if this consensus continues.

foxa  - your comment may have also been written by me! I'm not sure what to think after these first reviews, but Leo Bill, the cosy space of the Almeida (with a ramen pop-up booked before, and hopefully some G&Ts after) and an ice-cream are enough to lure me in. Going this Saturday, with my expectations now calibrated pretty low, though.

I felt very meh about this. I normally love anything to do with witchcraft, but this was really only surface level about witchcraft and I'm not really sure what they were going for instead?

This is definitely a blip in what has so far been a good season at the Almeida. I was expecting something more along the lines of The Crucible, instead got what felt like a slightly more adult Horrible Histories episode.

Some in the audience tonight thought this was proper laugh out loud funny, but I just didn't get it.


After a pretty horrific day in work, I couldn't face Act 2, so left at the interval. By the sounds of it, I didn't miss it getting any better.

Mix of reviews, 2 to 4 so far, but urgh some of the 2 star reviews read compellingly. I will probably risk it, but may free Mr Foxa from the duty - not sure even an ice cream would make up for it.

Very much with Forrest on this one - I wasn't bored, visually it was splendid,some good performances (I particularly enjoyed Ionna Kimbook as the new wife) but I didn't really get what it was saying (and this wasn't helped by the Devil's prologue - something about what used to be called the devil is now 'systemic' - huh?) The last 15 minutes were a bit of a mess (the couple in front of me actually said out loud, 'This is going on too long.) Mr Foxa, who is better on history than me, was trying to work out what the civil war setting was saying to a modern audience,but didn't come to a conclusion. I think the playwright was reaching for something about property possibly (along the lines of property is theft because look at all the horrible things it makes people do) ...I really don't know.

However actually had a pleasant afternoon and very much enjoyed our Udderlicious ice creams on the way home (banana caramel and pistachio.)

I thought this was fun with some good acting and costumes.

I wasn't expecting anything deep so didn't think too much about how pointless it was...

Late to the party, but I very much enjoyed today's matinee.

It struck me as the play version of The Rolling Stones's "Sympathy for the Devil," but while it manages to rework the ideas, about humans constantly reinventing everything through revolution and violence, for a specifically British and female context, it lacks Richards's and Watts's primally entertaining rhythms and beats to engage us more viscerally with the ideas.

Some spoilers follow. . .

Whereas Jagger's Devil "stuck around St. Petersburg" to kill the Czar, Raczka's sticks around a Cavalier household to join Cromwell's Roundheads in bringing it down.

But as in Jagger's song, the Devil doesn't do the dirty work alone, it's "you and me." And here, the you and me are all women.

Like a female Boris Johnson, Lydia Leonard's dry witty Lady of the House, Elizabeth, believes she can flirt with and take control of revolutionary forces (for Johnson, Brexit, for Elizabeth, "witchcraft") but still leave "the house" standing with her as the defacto head of it, but as with Johnson, and all Revolutionaries, she loses control of the revolution she's inspired, and endangers the "house" she's sworn to protect, and Thomas Middleton style, finds herself sidelined and the house in peril.

Elizabeth's supposed ally in her mini-coup, Alison Oliver's witch, Agnes, is a much more dangerous figure than the urbane, witty, cynical but pragmatic Elizabeth, because she's a true believer, more a Robespierre than a Johnson. Thus we see her at the beginning, trying the hardest to be "good" and loyal to God. But like all true believers, she is prone to damascene conversions, whereby her beliefs can be flipped around, and she ends up being an explosive revolutionary threat, with all the violence that entails. Oliver plays the part in a distinctly Irish accent, which compounds the irony of her revolutionary character, as the revolution she is facilitating, we know will ultimately will lead to Oliver Cromwell's Roundheads committing wholesale true-believing bloody murder on the island of Ireland in the name of Puritanism.

These two women flit around the orbit of the man who owns the house, Leo Bill's Edward, whose love of beef (manly) and hatred of fish (feminine) reveal a pathetic clinging to a rigid gender identity which is at war with his intrinsic effeteness. He clings to the order of King and Country, and is so committed to being in charge, he can't even get it up for an equal, only for underlings and overlings lol. Bill marvellously realises the contradictions of the man, and gets multiple laughs out of illustrating them.

Raczka's attitude to everything is that of a historian, nonjudgementally presenting a circular history of horrors in a Darwinian and descriptive way. Her title suggests that she resists the lure of Revolution, since women should beware of it, but the prologue acknowledges that everything we are now follows from the history we witness.

So I think Raczka is as on point with her ideas as Jagger is in his masterpiece of a song.

But we are primal creatures, and we seek a primal undercurrent of laughs and scares and tears, which emotions Raczka only occasionally succeeds in playing on: she milks Bill's character for laughs, and she milks Leonard's character for wit and intelligence, and Oliver's catalyst of a character is ever fascinating and the most primal and least civilised in her behaviour. But the sheer primal majesty of Richards and Watts isn't sufficiently there to make this as entertaining as The Rolling Stones's masterpiece.

So I'd give it 4 stars, as for me, it's very interesting and intellectually entertaining, but I'd withhold a star for not making Bill sillier, Leonard cleverer, and Oliver scarier. We need more primal engagement as an undercurrent to intellectual engagement.