WITCHCRAFT. To 10 May.
London.
WITCHCRAFT
by Joanna Baillie.
Finborough Theatre Finborough Road Brasserie 118 Finborough Road SW10 9ED To 10 May 2008.
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat & Sun 3pm
Runs 2hr 25min One interval.
TICKETS: 0844 847 1652.
www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 May.
Love and intrigue recreated in a small space.
If this country has a national theatre, it has long seemed to reside, in repertoire terms, in West London, at Richmond’s Orange Tree or the Finborough in Earl’s Court. Both mix new plays with exploration of forgotten, valuable areas of the past. And both have coincidentally lighted on Joanna Baillie, the long-lived, prolific playwright whose De Monfort opens in Richmond while the Finborough’s Witchcraft has a week to run.
Baillie’s strictly National Theatre Scotland territory as she was born at Bothwell, Lanarkshire in 1762. Daughter of a clergyman and Divinity Professor she might well have turned to this play’s subject, doing so with an Enlightenment rationalism. Having terrified audiences for two hours with dark deeds in a castle and around an abbey doubtless located in that favoured location “another part of the forest” (designer Katherine Hayes neatly suggests both with her grey-stoned set in this small space), Baillie has a royal messenger arrive to save the situation and denounce belief in witches.
Such salvation was a contrivance going back to Euripides (where gods rather than monarchs dispatched these plot-switching people), while Baillie’s reversals of fortune recall the Plautus and Moliere endings where coincidence and revelations of past connections bring all aright.
Admirable as the Orange Tree is, this is the more successful Baillie revival. For one thing Witchcraft has a story that takes its time, but reveals good and evil, if in a conventional way for its age. There are intriguing characters, like the gorgeous blonde who, as in Raymond Chandler, turns out the villainness. Allison McKenzie’s Annabella guards family pride from a love-match with the daughter of a disgraced commoner. Contriving and lying, she seeks to cast Violet Murrey as a witch.
Stephanie Farrell’s Violet shows loyalty to her father and suffers nobly till an end where she moves from being absolute for death through set-faced defiance to joy within moments.
Bronwen Carr’s production moves swiftly through the action, with a number of dependable performances, giving sense to a piece conceived for a larger, more spectacular staging, finding human individuality in Baillie’s stock characters with mounting tension and clarity.
Lady Dungarren/Grizled Bane:Holly de Jong.
Annabella: Allison McKenzie.
Phemy/Elspy Lowe: Suzanne McKenzie.
Anderson/Fatheringham: Martin Ritchie.
Robert Kennedy: John Milroy.
Black Bawldy: Neil McNulty.
Mary MacMurren/Nurse: Joanne Cummins.
Murrey: Scott Ainslie.
Rutherford: Scott McFarlan.
Violet Murrey: Stephanie Farrell.
Sheriff of Renfrewshire: David Whitney.
Director: Bronwen Carr.
Designer: Katherine Hayes.
Lighting: Jason Kirk.
Sound: Matt Downing.
Music: Andrew Rawnsley.
2008-05-05 12:27:12