Rupert Goold’s new show, Women, Beware the Devil, has great costumes, sumptuous sets and an intriguing chessboard stage like a Vermeer painting. Impressive to look at but that’s where the good news ends. Dramatist Lulu Raczka should have thought twice before writing a script about witchcraft, which was bound to invite comparisons with The Crucible, one of the greatest plays in the theatrical canon. Raczka is no Arthur Miller. She seems to take a dim view of human beings and her writing feels like a vehicle for her vengeful sense of revulsion. Her female characters are mostly skittish, cackling ninnies and her males are lusty, arrogant, predatory monsters. No figure in this play is remotely likeable and no one has a dramatic goal that makes any sense.

The yarn is set in a sprawling 17th-century mansion where childless Elizabeth must ensure that her brother Edward impregnates his young wife Catherine so that their family can retain the estate. If Catherine fails to breed, the property will pass to unknown relatives. Why this anxiety troubles Elizabeth but not Edward isn’t clear. Elizabeth sets about getting her sister-in-law pregnant by finding a dim Irish skivvy, Agnes, who is rumoured to be a sorceress, and asking her to join the household. Agnes is instructed to conjure a baby out of Catherine. How exactly? Don’t ask. The question isn’t tackled. More importantly, why is Catherine not pregnant already? She’s an attractive young woman recently married to the sex-mad Edward who rapes every female he can get his hands on, including his own sister. How come he won’t touch Catherine? (Answer: if he seduced her, the story would fall apart. The writer seems to have hoped to solve this problem by pretending it didn’t exist.)

Artistic difficulties mount up. Raczka keeps repeating the same incidents and gestures but without developing them. Agnes is twice told that she’ll be condemned as a witch and hanged. Two different characters are forced to imitate dogs. Scenes in which a character slices open a limb occur four times. Characters are slapped in the face on numerous occasions. The Devil keeps wandering on and off stage, sometimes dressed as a posh gent and sometimes as a witch-finder – although the witch-finder may be a separate character altogether. Many scenes end with a servant screeching ‘ha!’ at other servants. At the close of the first act, Agnes walks downstage and shouts ‘boo!’ into the stalls. Even pantomime writers can end a scene better than that.

In Act Two the impenetrable plot falls to pieces when Agnes swaps places with Catherine but no one else seems to notice, even though the women look and sound entirely different. It’s impossible to care about a show written as lazily and artlessly as this. More surprises arrive from nowhere. The English civil war breaks out. Agnes acquires the power to smite women dead with thunderbolts. A blonde female in a silk frock sits for her portrait for some reason. And the show ends with two death scenes that are so hopelessly overdone they wouldn’t have been funnier if Rowan Atkinson had performed them. To be fair, the audience whooped and cheered wildly at the curtain call and gave every indication of loving the show. But anyone with script-editing skills must know that this cumbersome muddle should never have reached the stage.

The Almeida has also commissioned new work from Michael John O’Neill whose first full-length play, Akedah, is running at the Hampstead. It opens with a sketch that might have graced the Dave Allen show. Gill, an unmarried woman of 33, is walking along a beach in Ulster when she witnesses two swimmers drowning somebody in the sea. She plunges into the waves to rescue the victim only to discover that she has interrupted a full-immersion baptism. Quite an amusing scene, although the script doesn’t explore its comic potential. Gill’s mistake brings her into contact with her younger sister, Kelly, who has joined the church in the hope of finding a substitute family. Both women are angry, bitter and horribly damaged by their awful childhood and the play consists of lengthy discussions about their relentlessly nasty upbringing. Not a lot of laughs here. Not even one, in fact. And the sisters are separated by a gap of 15 years but the actors look the same age so the impact of their different chronological perspectives is lost.

Towards the end, their weepy mum arrives and adds a new layer of misery to this festival of torment. ‘I suffered from hard drug and alcohol addiction,’ she sobs, reciting a therapist’s medical notes, ‘as well as low self-esteem, eating disorders and undiagnosed post-natal depression.’ Gosh, this play is hard work. It’s yet another long, screechy muddle from a cheerless apprentice writer who needs help, and more practice, before his shows are mounted in future.