ROYAL COURT THEATRE LONDON – UNTIL 25th APRIL 2024
Reviewed by Jackie Thornton
5*****
This award-winning play has already delighted audiences with its run at the Edinburgh Fringe last year and upstairs at the Jerwood on a rainy Monday night, it certainly doesn’t disappoint. Historian and co-creator Lydia Higman also takes to the stage as part witty narrator, part musician, to guide us through the bizarre true story of a 17th Century witch trial, long forgotten.
In a small village just outside Oxford in 1604, Anne Gunter (Nora Lopez Holden) starts convulsing, vomiting pins and accusing local women of bewitching her. Or more accurately, her father, Brian Gunter (Hannah Jarrett-Scott), the richest man in the village, can only explain his daughter’s disturbing behaviour as being the work of a grieving mother (co-creator Julie Grogan) whose sons he had gruesomely killed at a football match.
Lopez Holden, Jarrett-Scott and Grogan take on a variety of roles with humour, song and bags of energy as they reenact the trial while Ligman occasionally intervenes to remind us of the barbarity of it all. It’s a show that’s acutely aware of its form and how to provoke reactions from the audience, using a range of textures, tones and techniques to keep us enthralled.
Direction from Rachel Lemon ensures there are nods to stand up comedy, larger than life caricature monologues, childlike audience participation, bluesy haunting harmonies, fake blood, chilling acts of violence, fireworks, hilarious animal masks. The most effective of all is the incongruous clashing of upbeat musical genres with the bleak content of the trial, which evokes big belly laughs. It’s a marvellous showcase for the extensive talents of these brilliant, young creative performers. Nothing about it is naturalistic or realistic yet it manages to produce that magical quality of revealing great truths that speak to our times while also being wildly entertaining.