Witchcraft
2 May 2008
Written by 
Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft is definitely a play of its time. Ghosts and witches, mysterious figures stalking a stormy moor, duels and revenges and an eleventh-hour tale of piracy all feature in this quintessentially Romantic yarn. A child’s unexplained illness gets fatally entwined with love and jealousy as rumours of witchcraft spread through a Scottish village. This tangled skein of a tale is unravelled with admirable clarity by Bronwen Carr’s company, who manage to rise above some frankly ropey production values to give an intriguing account of this rediscovered drama.
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.
Witchcraft is at the Finborough until 10 May.
Image Top: Allison McKenzie; Photo by Marilyn Kingwill.
Image Bottom: John Milroy and Stephanie Farrell; photo by Marilyn Kingwill.
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