SABBAT. To 21 February.
Lancaster.
SABBAT
by Richard Shannon.
Duke’s Playhouse (The Round) To 21 February 2009.
Mon-Sat 8pm May 11, 21 Feb 2pm, 14 Feb 3pm.
Audio-described 17 Feb.
BSL Signed 13 Feb.
Post-show Discussion 10 Feb.
Runs 1hr 55min One interval.
TICKETS: 01524 598500.
www.dukes-lancaster.org
Review: Timothy Ramsden 3 February.
Fears and miseries find their outlet in well-wrought drama.
Pendle, Lancashire, beat Massachusetts’ Salem to witchcraft trials by eighty years. In 1612 a mix of fears and suspicions led to ten executions. Nowadays, we don’t go after witches; having more secular groups to blame for dangers and misfortunes. Pendle merely explained its injuries and the infertility of people or lands in terms of their age’s unseen enemy with formidable powers.
They, like us, found external explanations when shocked as another child died in the womb, or a peddler was struck lame after a woman curses him (a remarkable coincidence). Richard Shannon explores this efficiently. He doesn’t go for any explicit modern gloss; nor does he patronise his characters. It’s only a pity he provides a clichéd sexual element to his Puritan Magistrate’s past.
His small-scale play accommodates an impressive sense of the isolated place which grasped fragments of news from elsewhere, and had a closed idea of what’s proper, showing the downside of community: where to be poor, outcast or just different, especially for women, could make someone suspect. Yet it isn’t only the puzzled, slow-witted Jennet who’s accused but the respectable woman who’s clung to the old, Catholic religion and is assisting magistrate Nowell's wife when she miscarries.
She’s accused by the disappointed father, who David Acton plays as sunnily reasonable (his world comprehended by the books he often carries) until he’s agonised into hatred by another child lost before birth. Acton’s sudden, inarticulate rage speaks a hundred explanatory words in a moment. Once witchcraft’s entered the mind it proves appallingly logical, especially when those women had been meeting on Malkin Hill…
From Amaka Okafor’s Jennet, innocently fantasising about familiar spirits, through the anguish of Christine Mackie’s Alice, trapped by a different innocence and a small lie, to Hannah Emanuel’s Judith, mixing physical pain with disbelief at her husband’s actions, Amy Leach’s production marshals the scenes clearly with fine performances. And Miriam Nabarro’s setting in the Round splits this world between the clean order of a Puritan home and the earthy unkemptness of the countryside - and the mind‘s imaginings - while meat-hooks ominously loom above them all.
Roger Nowell: David Acton.
Judith Nowell: Hannah Emanuel.
Alice Nutter: Christine Mackie.
Jennet Preston: Amaka Okafor.
Director: Amy Leach.
Designer: Miriam Nabarro.
Lighting: Brent Lees.
Composer/Musical Director: John Biddle.
2009-02-08 12:19:32