The youngest, and as it happened, the least experienced members of the company, were cast as the Salem girls whose
ill-advised nocturnal games set in motion the horrible train of events that finally smashes into the buffers of the Salem courthouse. Some of the actors tell us about how they prepared for their roles, Sara Beharrel, who plays Mary Warren, did a lot of
physical preparation and listened to music, Bethan Cecil, who
plays sleeping Betty in Act 1, works out how much she hears of what is going on around her to determine how she reacts, and Michelle Tate, who plays Mercy Lewis, analyses
her character's objectives in each scene. Patricia Kerrigan, an older actor who plays Elizabeth Proctor, used a technique called
method training to get into her role. For Leah Muller, who plays Abigail,
some of the challenges are setting the tone at the beginning of the play and working out how far she can push Abigail’s hysteria.
In Act 1, as Betty Parris lies motionless on a bed in her father’s attic, Mercy and Abigail are briefly free of adult supervision and use the opportunity to attempt to coerce Betty out of her comatose state. The actors carefully choreograph the attempt by Abigail and the ill-named ‘Mercy’ Lewis to literally
shake and threaten Betty into consciousness. Mary enters the room, informing the others that rumours of witchcraft are spreading across the country, and as the girls continue to shake Betty, she suddenly jumps out of bed and
tries to fly out the window. There is debate as to whether
whether Betty really believes that she can fly but Bethan says that it’s a more interesting choice to think that she can, since otherwise she would be committing suicide. Director Jonathan Church says that the
rehearsals allowed the actors to develop their characters and to consider the scene from different points of view.
