‘These metaphysics of magicians, and necromantic books are heavenly!’ Jade-Marie was strutting in a masculine fashion across the pallet stage, hands on hips. ‘Lines, circles, signs, letters and characters,’ she continued. ‘Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.’

Dellie Leven was heard to mutter, ‘Oh, dear Lord!’ before crossing herself.

Heads turned, as surreptitiously as they could, towards the headmaster. Would he call a halt, now that the initial godliness of the play, like those paper programmes, had disappeared on the wind? He did not. He stared forward.

Anna and Britta arrived on stage then in white nightdresses as the good and evil angels. The mood of the crowd softened; this would be a morality play after all. And it was, in essence. One man sells his soul to the Devil and takes the consequences – there was an admirably pious message in that. But there was also something to be drawn from the way the three girls dressed while playing the gossiping scholars – in blouses that tied at the throat, the current trend among the women who surrounded the tea urn after Sunday service. When Faustus and the Devil (a deep-voiced Britta, resplendent in a headdress of coiled goat horns) taunted the religious men at the Vatican office, the set bore a resemblance, through its particular arrangement of props, to a certain office closer to home, at the school of St Rita’s.

For a scene in Act Four where Faustus conjures up the ghosts of Alexander and his paramour, Anna and Britta arrived on stage in dripping wet robes. This was supposed to signify their journey back across the River Styx, but they more closely resembled a drowned fisherman and a sodden little girl, than they did figures from Ancient Greece.

Should anyone have dared to point out these parallels, though, they would only have incriminated themselves, become complicit in the accusations. The allusions were there, but also they were not.

What transpired on the stage was absolutely a morality play, one that spoke to the deep, shared understanding of a community. The audience listened as one, that was how it felt – as one mind, one collective subconscious, both good and bad, if a clear line can ever be drawn between the two.

When the girls delivered their epilogue – ‘Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight…’ – many of that audience found themselves crying, surprised by their emotions, unable to explain coherently what their tears were in aid of.

The curtains closed to a hush; the slip and slop of the sea in the harbour the only sound. The red-haired coycrock girl left immediately, head down, scuffing away past the smokehouse, as the Eldest Girls’ mothers broke the contemplative tension, standing to clap and cheer, allowing the others around them to do the same, to have their release.

They applauded on the left, and they applauded in the middle.

They even applauded on the right – but how could they not?

Friday the 13th – April 2018