Oddly, however, the set of Stephen Keyworth’s production contains no practical doors. This design choice follows Grochala’s instruction that we should never see the prisoners’ actual exit, but it also undermines her subject’s rootedness in the most appalling and atrocious realities. We watch actors scurrying embarrassedly on and off a not-quite-blacked-out set, when we might be faced with human beings walking through a doorway leading to annihilation.

In fact, just what lies beyond the doors of the photographer’s closed world is a persistent difficulty. The very young company tackle the play’s series of one-on-one encounters with earnestness and clarity, but no discernable sense of what they’re supposed to have suffered – or fear. And it’s unfortunate that some of them end up playing multiple roles, leading to an understandable focus on differentiating their characters, rather than making them ordinary, unremarkable, un-actorly people who just happen to have stumbled into hell.

There are a couple of exceptions to this atmosphere of well-intentioned vagueness. As Col, Tom Reed brings a riskily contemporary edge to his physical bearing and his bitterness. Pippa Nixon’s May has a hunched, defensive, accusing roughness that makes the worst of her actions seem possible, and an intense, ravenous imagining of a landscape beyond prison walls that burns through the closing stages of her performance.

S-27 is a series of fictionalised testimonies, talking heads and tortured images. It would perhaps work better in a staging stripped of scenic realism, focussing simply upon faces, words and photos. But this production represents an uneasy compromise between naturalism and the demands of a limited budget, and the result, while committed and sometimes compelling, lacks detail, credibility and grit.

Phil Willmott’s production is bedevilled by some ill-advised spatial design, necessitating much shuffling around bits of the set, and the shallow playing-space makes keeping a crucial secret in the bag for any length of time a pretty forlorn hope. Period costume for a company of ten also seems at times to stretch the budget to breaking point, but the cast beautifully capture the emotional realities underlying the play’s sentimental absurdities.

Moir Leslie imbues the well-meaning sallies of Bashforth’s fashionable mother with briskness, foolishness and dash. Sarah Feathers gives a charmingly pitched performance as the finitely sweet-tempered wife of a country curate, nobly supported by genial Paul Critoph as her ineffectually affable spouse. As Oliver and Laura, Daniel Abelson and Victoria Gee negotiate the thorny proposition scene with touchingly pensive, hurt honesty. And among Pinero’s roll-call of war casualties, Jamie Hinde brings discreet showmanship to the role of sightless Hillgrove, Lachlan Nieboer’s Rigg makes an unexpectedly powerful curtain-speech, and Nicola Wright’s tight-lipped housekeeper finally breaks her silence to reveal a hard-won, healing wisdom.

If some of the running jokes are wearing lead boots (was Bognor funnier a hundred years ago?) the sentimental core of the drama has kept its poignant freshness and power. A small flurry of wiped eyes at the curtain call bears testimony to Pinero’s grasp of the foolishly hopeful human heart. An old-fashioned confection of kindly wish-fulfilment, Country Magic nevertheless appeals to the enduring desire that small miracles might somewhere, and somehow, occur.

James Graham’s Sons of York riffs bitterly on Henry VI; warring fathers and sons, the grudges that get passed on, and the way ideals get shaken in their transit from one generation to the next. In the midst of it all sits Dad in his paper crown, tyrannising over the ruined mockery of a Christmas dinner, fighting a lost campaign against “that bloody woman” in which his own family are the principal sufferers.

The excellent company make a compellingly credible family group. William Maxwell’s Dad is dangerously balanced between endearing, hearty bluster and unpredictably vengeful anger. Steven Webb as Mark delicately captures the teenage boy’s mercurial, gormless fragility, hero-worshipping Larkin and Bowie, and perpetually getting smacked round the head for some unintended solecism. And Kazia Pelka brilliantly reveals the unflinching intelligence and determination behind nurse Brenda’s professional cheer.

Kate Wasserberg’s terse and attentive direction is supported by some thrilling lighting from Tom White, as the lethal crossfire of family dissension reaches its crescendo. Sitting close enough to the cast to smell the vinegar on their chips, the audience is lured into a horrifying unravelling of fierce, wounded pride, divided loyalties and clashing ideals. “Now civil wounds are stopp’d” assert the play’s closing lines, but the shadow of Richard III subverts the promise of lasting peace for a family, and a country, embattled against itself.

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Top photo: Kazia Pelka, Colette Kelly and William Maxwell in Sons of York at the Finborough Theatre. Photograph copyright of Marilyn Kingwill.

Bottom photo: Stephen Webb and William Maxwell in Sons of York at the Finborough Theatre. Photograph copyright of Marilyn Kingwill.

The plot may include some wonderful absurdities, to which the cast respond with varying degrees of plausibility or daftness, but Carr unearths a darker agenda at work beneath Witchcraft’s fantastical plot devices. The play is full of impassioned, powerless women, whose desires are all-too-easily interpreted as demonic. Beautiful Annabella is a golden-haired doll, struggling alone to negotiate a woman’s thwarted passion. Allison McKenzie captures her tenuous self-possession and gradual physical disintegration with unsettling conviction and courage. In contrast, Stephanie Farrell’s Violet is a composed, knowing and self-mocking heroine, whose refusal to appear to be less than she is leaves her vulnerable to violent fantasies. Both instinctively rebel against the emotional and imaginative restrictions of a complacent squirearchy, and both are punished for their presumption. Watching these events, a baleful, wounded presence, Suzanne McKenzie brings depth and a dangerous look in the eye to two intensely imagined cameos.

The menfolk are less interesting characters, although John Milroy brings vigour, sensitivity and warmth to his portrayal of the well-meaning, short-sighted Dungarren. Neil McNulty is compelling as a sharp-witted, credulous urchin, and in his effortless exchanges with hardworking Martin Ritchie the Scots dialect crackles like dry kindling.

Witchcraft is definitely not for the linguistically faint-hearted, nor for those who can’t handle a few clunking plot-devices. But this is an intelligent, if uneven production of Baillie’s uncanny drama, and in Carr’s quietly subversive staging it’s the damaged women, deprived even of their imagined devils, who silently haunt the play’s final moments.