Caryl Churchill’s 1976 play brings a feminist perspective to one of the darkest chapters in the English Civil War. During the 1640s. The emergence of self-appointed ‘witchfinders’ like the notorious Matthew Hopkins, flourished to the extent that witchfinding became a profitable industry and led to the deaths of over 300 women. For the jealous, the envious or the generally disaffected, the appeal was obvious: simply accuse your neighbour of witchcraft if they put your nose out of joint or your crops fail, and you can have them conveniently removed.
This is the plight of Mother Joan Noakes, a poor elderly widow from the Fen Country who lives in penury with her daughter and her cat (the ‘Vinegar Tom’ of the title), until an altercation with her farmer neighbours leads them to suspect that she is responsible for their crop failures and the sickness of their cattle. But Joan is not the only one with problems .... Betty, the virginal daughter of a local plutocrat, refuses to marry the man selected for her by her parents and, in consequence, is confined to her room and tortured under the same suspicion; and a local (female) apothecary falls under the same opprobrium for helping a local woman abort an unwanted child. The arrival of Packer the Witchfinder - the worst imaginable kind of spiritual quack - ensures that the innocent suffer while the guilty go unpunished.
Matthew Parker’s production for OVO Theatre Company makes excellent use of the Maltings Studio Theatre, with minimal set (three raised daises and a passion!) but period costumes courtesy of Alice McNicholas. The real innovation here though, is the creation of a rock score (by Maria Haik Escudero) to accompany Churchill’s lyrics - originally envisaged to be sung by one character, but here reimagined for the entire company, who prove proficient on guitar, percussion, bass and keyboards. Interpolating a dramatic text with music can be fraught with danger (I recall a rather awful production of Much Ado About Nothing featuring Gershwin songs, where I’d have been happy to have ditched the play and kept the songs), but not in this case. The programme describes how inspiration was taken from the likes of P J Harvey, First Aid Kit and Fleetwood Mac; but to my ears, it was more reminiscent of Gang Of Four, particularly with reference to Jon Bonner’s non-retro psychedelic guitar lines.
In a generally strong cast, performance honours go to Jill Priest as the persecuted Mother Joan, Alan Howell as a farmer who feels his manhood has been (literally) stolen by Joan’s daughter Alice (Emilia Harrild) and Bonner in the dual roles of Alice’s demonic lover and the appalling Packer. Cathy Conneff also makes an impression as the hysterical farmer’s wife. This is a semi-in-the-round staging (audience enclosing acting space on three sides) and the ensemble projects well - considerably better than in another studio production I saw recently where the actors, despite being mic'd up, still contrived not to be intelligible. Occasionally, a couple of sentences didn’t register but that might be down to getting to know the space.
This enterprising company should be commended for undertaking something so ambitious at a time when theatres and companies are tempted to fall back on the easy and over-familiar.
Reviewer - Paul Ashcroft
on - 29.10.21
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