Coven Comes to the Kiln: A Musical Witch Hunt Like No Other

On Halloween there’s a tradition for people to climb Pendle Hill in Lancashire and place a stone on the hill. Apparently, the aim is to keep the witches in the hill and stop them getting out. But Rebecca Brewer and Daisy Chute, the writers of Coven, a new musical at the Kiln Theatre inspired by England’s most notorious witch trials, are letting the witches out. They think it is high time that we reconsidered the image of broomsticks and cackles and evil which comes to most of our minds when we hear the word witch.

“Sometimes,” suggests Chute, the singer-songwriter who has co-written the music and lyrics with Brewer, who also wrote the book, “the easiest way to understand the present is to look to history.” A string of plays by playwrights and companies, including Ava Pickett and Dirty Hare, have been doing just that, and of course, the hit musical Six offers an entirely different perspective on Henry VIII’s wives from the one we learn in school. It gives them the voice history has denied them.

Coven, too, a female-led project directed by the Olivier-winning Miranda Cromwell, offers a different perspective on an old story. For actor and writer Brewer, who grew up in Yorkshire aware of the story, it was rediscovering it through a Simon Armitage documentary, The Pendle Witch Child, that kick-started creativity. “I knew in my bones this was an inherently musical story.” She also wanted to tell a story about a northern rural community.

Coven rehearsal photo by Marc Brenner.

Brewer and Chute’s version of the story is “a fiction inspired by fact” and focuses on the real-life Jennet Device, who, aged nine, gave testimony against her own family, including her mother and sister, which led to their and eight other people’s execution as witches. Twenty years later Janet herself was accused of witchery. But what motivated Jennet’s testimony and the craze for seeking out witches that blazed across 17th-century England?

It sounds like dark material for a musical, but Chute, who was in Les Misérables as a nine-year-old, points out that show “is a very dark musical.” She adds firmly, “Not every musical has to be a happy love story.”

Brewer’s decision to collaborate with Chute, who was not at that time working in the sphere of musical theatre, was a deliberate one. She was looking for a different approach and sound. The pair were both certain that the music needed to reflect the community it depicts, but, as Brewer says, “not necessarily in a historically accurate way” (Florence and the Machine is just one of the many influences). “We wanted the music to be rootsy and rebellious and draw on protest anthems.”

Coven rehearsal photo by Marc Brenner.

Beautiful too. The song Care, released across several platforms, is a moving anthem sung by a midwife about the care women provide for women. “We are not going anywhere; you can hide us in the back streets, but we will still be there.” Brewer argues that at a time when laws are tightening across the world to stop women from having autonomy over their own bodies, the story of Coven is more important than ever.  “Care is a song about a woman in the 17th century, but it could be about a woman in 2025.”

It's been no easy feat to bring Coven to the stage. In fact, it has taken eight years. Before it was a book musical, it was a concept album, and then Douglas Rintoul at the Queen's Theatre in Hornchurch heard about it and suggested the pair perform some of it at a scratch night. That version, which they describe as “like a TED talk with songs”, developed over time and won a following at gig performances.

Coven rehearsal photo by Marc Brenner.

They had conversations with producers and an aborted attempt to take a version to the 2020 Edinburgh Fringe (scuppered by Covid) and got some ACE funding to develop it. But they always knew that to do true justice to the story, they needed lots of bodies on stage. They wanted it to take up space. It was an introduction to producer Adam Kenwright and Kindred that made that possible. After many workshops, the version which hits the Kiln this month has a cast of 13.

Coven may be opening over Halloween, but Brewer and Chute are keen to play with audience expectations. They say that people keep asking them whether or not the show will be spooky and scary. Perhaps it will be, but perhaps not in the ways that people think. Because maybe it is not witches we should fear but the societal pressures and individual self-interest that encourage witch-hunts. Not just yesterday, but today too.

Cover image from Coven, playing at the Kiln Theatre from Fri 31 Oct to Sat 13 Dec 2025. Book your tickets via our website or app.