The Manningtree Witches review – Ava Pickett’s gripping follow-up to Tudor hit 1536
#Ava Pickett #The Manningtree Witches #Tudor #historical fiction #witch trials #1536 #book review #follow-up
📌 Key Takeaways
- Ava Pickett's new novel 'The Manningtree Witches' is a follow-up to her Tudor-era hit '1536'.
- The book is described as a gripping historical narrative, likely focusing on witch trials in Manningtree.
- It continues Pickett's exploration of Tudor history, blending fiction with historical events.
- The review suggests the novel maintains the engaging style that made her previous work successful.
📖 Full Retelling
<p><strong>Mercury theatre, Colchester</strong> <br>The targets of the infamous 17th-century ‘witchfinder general’ narrate a powerful play based on AK Blakemore’s novel</p><p>‘It does not matter what is true,” a teenager tells us after giving a testimony of witchcraft against a group of women including her own mother. What matters, she says, is “what is written down”. It is advice passed down to Rebecca (Lucy Mangan) by her indomitable mother, Anne (Gina Isaac
🏷️ Themes
Historical Fiction, Witch Trials
📚 Related People & Topics
Ava Pickett
British screenwriter and playwright
Ava Pickett (born 1993 or 1994) is an English screenwriter and playwright. Her debut play 1536 won the 2023–24 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She was a staff writer on The Great and she co-wrote Baz Luhrmann's upcoming film Jehanne d’Arc.
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Review The Manningtree Witches review – Ava Pickett’s gripping follow-up to Tudor hit 1536 Mercury theatre, Colchester The targets of the infamous 17th-century ‘witchfinder general’ narrate a powerful play based on AK Blakemore’s novel ‘I t does not matter what is true,” a teenager tells us after giving a testimony of witchcraft against a group of women including her own mother. What matters, she says, is “what is written down”. It is advice passed down to Rebecca (Lucy Mangan) by her indomitable mother, Anne (Gina Isaac), in this whiplash of a play, adapted by Ava Pickett from AK Blakemore’s award-winning 2021 novel . What was written down in the real case of the Manningtree witch trials of 1645 is minimal when it comes to the Essex women convicted and hung for devilry by Matthew Hopkins, a self-styled “witchfinder general”. Five women targeted by him jointly narrate here with the primary focus on Rebecca, a clever, beady-eyed observer who tells of how Hopkins (Sam Mitchell) enters the town as an inn-keeper but soon reveals his purpose, with sermons and fearmongering in church. He is a watchful figure in black, like a Puritan version of the Lone Ranger, and the women he suspects are overwhelmingly poor or widowed, their husbands or sons dead as a result of the civil war raging across the land. We see events through Rebecca’s eyes and her monologues make apparent that this is a story of teen sexual awakenings in a climate of heated misogyny. It plays out in period dress but feels in spirit like Margaret Atwood’s dystopian Gilead. Pickett’s adaptation preserves much of Blakemore’s lyricism, also reflected in Sara Perks’ arresting set design which has a central staircase, floodlights and a swarm of black in the backdrop from which characters appear and disappear. The production is reminiscent of Pickett’s Tudor play 1536 but the finger-pointing, more than a century later, is far more febrile. Under Natasha Rickman’s fabulous direction, the foreboding is cranked up fro...
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