Beginning earlier than the play, the ballet begins with an illicit tryst between married farmer John Proctor (Nicholas Shoesmith) and his adolescent maid Abigail (Constance Devernay). Her movement becomes more animated as she embraces her nascent sexual power but it is not to last. Proctor’s wife Elizabeth (Sophie Martin) discovers the infidelity and Abigail is immediately dismissed. Riven with a heady mix of shame and fury, she heads into the woods where she and her young friends attempt to perform a bacchanalian ritual to kill Elizabeth.
When their hedonistic cavorting is discovered by the pious Reverend Parris and the reverend’s own daughter falling ill, the girls pretend to have been contacted by the devil and start naming members of their community. The production brilliantly demonstrates how these Puritan townsfolk who are so law abiding and religious, with their fantastic precise angular movement, dancing to the tune of their religious leader can suddenly descend, with little provocation, into hysteria: the stage, with its magnificent corps de ballet, suddenly filled with flashes of carnage, savagery and chaos.