BROTHER, CHRISTIAN, WITCHFINDER
I reviewed this play about the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins last year, in Ipswich: I write only to add thoughts, now that it has deservedly reached the capital and is set for an off-Broadway run next year . America needs it just as we do in times of bigotry and fanaticism: . just as in the McCarthy era it needed The Crucible.
Below is a link to my original review in Ipswich, but here are some fresh thoughts. See a new play several times and forgotten feelings rise. The terrible grandeur of fanatical and murderous madness into which Joanna Carrick’s brilliant evocation of the 1640’s witch-trials had made me almost forget its opening scenes, and how fast one falls in love with the sweetness of the central pair – Christopher Ashman and Nadia Jackson as Richard and Susan Edwards of Mistley. His farmerly humour ,her womanly commonsense , their gradual love and marriage draw you into 17c rural Essex life: we enter their griefs for lost infants and – atavistic as it seems – honour their Cromwellian-Puritan language about God’s will and the need to control base lusts. Jackson – for whom a year ago this play was a first professional job – is particularly astonishing in her gravity, humour and simple-hearted sensitivity; Ashman is bluff , straightforward, in perfect tune with his young wife and , while they live, his babies.
I had forgotten, too, how comfortably in the early scenes they, and we, laugh at the teenage geekiness and stammering religiosity of their half-brother Matthew Hopkins with his ever-clutched Bible and uneasy distaste for their warm marital sexuality. That extends to all women, doorways to the devil ever since Eve. I had also forgotten how, even late on during the rising horror of interrogations and hangings, his superstitious absurdities make the couple, and the audience, suddenly laugh again .
But the play’s trajectory is the same, works even better : its set of 16c furniture, nimbly movable props and tables, : a broomstick and baskets , a workmanlike stack of wooden furniture under a guttering candelabra. Simplicity can hit harder than theatrical splendour, and that applies equally to its form: four players, one kitchen, the sense beyond it of marshland and farms, community quarrels and jealousies, cows suddenly dying, a polecat’s scream on the river bank. A place where “lecturers” on the evils of the body and of Popery can become local dictators, self-appointed purifiers of the land, and lay the blame on old women whose mumblings might be curses, whose pet animals ‘familiars’ made of “condensed and thickened air” to hold demons.
Each of the three matures before our eyes for good or evil, growing in complication and subtle confusions. Nadia Jackson’s open sensible face is creased by grief, recovers, then hardens as the witchfinder’s persuasion offers the relief of vengeful rage for her griefs, her lost babies. We watch Ashman’s farmerly confidence growning as landowner, then crumbling as the demonic illusion reaches him under Hopkins’ persuasion. At last we see him struggling to right himself. Equally credible, we watch Vincent Moisy’s evolution from stammering inadequate to devout missioner – using fanaticism as relief of private stress, a lot of it clearly about sex – and thence to self-glorified power. We realize in horror that he was only 27 when he died, after years in which more witches were hanged than in over a century before. His is a progress which strikes uncomfortable parallels with many current fanaticisms led by youth, from jihadism to soup-flinging.
And the fourth player – Rei Mordue as the cowering, sometimes defiant Rebecca who is forced under Stalinist questioning to repeat evidence against her mother and the other old women – is remarkable too: grown since a year ago, heartbreaking.
Here is my original review, includes notes about the remarkable author and company:
southwarkplayhouse.co.uk. to 16 nov. (it’s the Borough branch!)
Rating five
theatreCat 