AN ANCIENT BRUTALITY, RIGHT HERE
Five women from the past mount the stage, candlelit, to enact theterrible story of the 17c Suffolk witch-trials. First there’s young Mary in childbed, screaming , tended by Rose from the ale-house and her mother Sarah. It’s a community with few men, the war barely ending. Rose calls for the local midwife and herbalist, Anne Alderman, a big ragged competent bundle of reassurance, dishing out pain nostrums, scornful of the smug male teaching that the pains of childbirth are caused by Eve’s sin and must be borne. But country wisdoms in a female world will be shattered with the arrival of Matthew Hopkins, the severe young witchfinder, and his sidekick Stearne. The local vicar, a tolerant country soul who doesn’t mind Ann selling herbs and tinctures after service, is wary of their mission . Well he might be.
It is interesting to meet Tallulah Brown’s new play a year after Joanna Carrick’s remarkable The Ungodly, which has since run in London and is booked for New York. That – set thirty miles away in Hopkins’ Mistley home – was a tight , psychologically subtle story of a troubled youth’s Puritanical fervour and misogynistic sexual dread . Here we find the self-styled Witchfinder General on his travels, collecting more victims. The five women play all the characters and sing, hauntingly , as they transform between scenes. Which is remarkably effective : Seraphina d’Arby’s music for Trills, a close harmony group, is atmospheric and used well, and the transformations where the players help one another in and out of breeches and hats and shifts in vision as they sing gives it a sense of pageantry, of ritual remembrance.
There are some terrific performances: notably Claire Storey’s vivid, earthy Anne Alderman, a treat, and Rachel Heaton as the motherly, devout Sarah and the anxiously dubious Judge Godbold who at last , alone of the male figures, questions the use of torture for confessions. Emily Hindle switches betweem Hopkins and his victim Rose: she’s excellent as the latter, an orphaned, troubled alewife stirring the beer as it seethes in its vat (it’s been cursed, possibly..though we home-brewers recognize the heaving). She too needs Anne Alderman’s services. As Hopkins she is less striking, until the real darkness of the second half where he provokes crazy, sexually explicit confessions. Indeed until that moment the men’s roles are woodenly written, with none of the necessary sense of religious fervour which gave Carrick’s earlier play a dark shine. Here, when Hopkins and Stearne talk about diabolical familiars suckling at diabolical teats and witches bilocating , they just sound mad. Whereas the women are all utterly and earthily credible.
The main drawback is that it’s too long: of its 165 minutes 20 or more could be cut with profit from unnecessary conversations and speeches top-loaded with research (though I did like the bit where Nathaniel has a nightmare about a bloodsucking rabbit climbing up his leg demanding that he deny God). And the play’s three dramatic endings are too many, as if desperate to serve diverse constituencies: the prison scene with the women singing defiantly to thrill the modern-pagan nature-worship feminism, then the executions, to hammer home the brutality. And finally a posthumous duologue on whether the future will remember the names of the Bury trial’s victims. Any of those endings would work, especially the last. But audiences can tire.
theatreroyal.org to 22 March
rating 3
theatreCat 