The Witch Of Edmonton at The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

4/5

The latest offering in the RSC’s Roaring Girls series of Renaissance plays, is based on a real life contemporary situation, the 1621 witchcraft trial and execution of Elizabeth Sawyer.

The three playwrights in this collaborative production, John Ford, Thomas Dekker and William Rowley, were quick off the mark to exploit the notoriety of the case.

Their spontaneity is reflected in a play which demands that a director weld the witch play to a main plot in which a young man, having to hide his marriage to a servant maid in order to secure his inheritance, is induced into a second, bigamous marriage, leading to despair and murder.

Gregory Doran’s production succeeds in presenting a society which convincingly encompasses the mindless harassment of the poverty-stricken Mother Sawyer by vindictive, superstitious neighbours with the social and economic tensions of an emerging middle class.

The devil, here a black, thorny-spined dog, is conjured by the desperate old woman — “’Tis all one to be a witch as to be counted one” — enabling her to gain revenge, including disrupting a morris dance, turning it into an hilarious, demented bacchanal and leading one of her main bugbears on a sexual wild goose chase ending in a dousing in the river.

Meanwhile more serious devilish influences are at play as social pressures force well intentioned Frank Thorney into a downward spiral to destruction.

Doran is splendidly served by outstanding performances from Eileen Atkins, resilient against all the odds, as Mother Sawyer, Ian Bonar as an increasingly entrapped Frank and Jay Simpson as a gleefully menacing canine devil.

Dafydd Llyr Thomas carries the comedy with a Bottom-like performance as the leader of the local morris men and the character who finally chases off the devil.

The play, unlike others in the series, gains from a period rather than a modernised setting, registering its relevance to our own age by the playwrights’ surprisingly modern take on the witchcraft issue in Mother Sawyer’s powerful denunciation of her accusers and the real witches of an exploitative society.

Runs in repertoire until November 29. Box Office (0844) 800-1114)

Gordon Parsons