Abstract
Watching an online live theatre performance was a first for me. Even before the play started, a web link replacing the usual ticket ushered me into an auditorium where I was informed of ‘a 96 per cent reduction in carbon emissions when doing a digital show’. Whatever apprehension I may have had was already allayed by feeling eco-responsible.
Although a first for me, it was not so for Creation Theatre. This award-winning company used to specialise in site-specific performances, but with the pandemic, they decided to go digital and have stayed there since. After The Tempest in 2020, then The Duchess of Malfi and Romeo and Juliet in 2021, Creation Theatre further explores Jacobean drama with a collaborative play by Thomas Dekker, William Rowley, and John Ford, The Witch of Edmonton, directed and adapted by Laura Wright.
The play rests on two independent plots connected only by the presence of the devil in the shape of a dog. Elizabeth Sawyer (Anna Tolputt), an old outspoken woman is accused of being a witch and ends up meeting the devil in the woods. Frank Thorney (Guy Clark) is in love with the servant Winifred (Lola Boulter) whom he secretly marries, but to avoid losing his inheritance, he accepts to marry Susan Carter (Chloe Lemonius) whom he later murders urged by the devil.
The text had to be heavily edited for the show to run slightly more than an hour. The subplot of Cuddy Banks with the Morris dancers disappears, as do Susan's and Kate's paramours unjustly accused of Susan's murder. The plot is thus stripped to the bone to focus on the contrast between Sawyer's witchery and Frank's bigamy.
The original play had been inspired by a then-recent witch trial of one Elizabeth Sawyer, and the playwrights heavily drew on a contemporary pamphlet by the minister Henry Goodcole who visited the accused in gaol. Wright seems to have wished to make this debt apparent as she inserts quotations from this very pamphlet as well as from other early modern reports of witch trials. The parallel with other existing witches is announced in an original prologue, which concludes with a list of women executed for witchcraft in England. The play is then reshaped into a series of scenes, separated from each other by black and white interludes devoted to such famous victims of witch hunts as Agnes Brown of Northampton, Elizabeth Southern of Pendle or Ursley Kemp of St Osyth, the last interlude being of course devoted to Elizabeth Sawyer herself.
The costumes are not exactly modern, but suggest a sort of mid-twentieth-century, tweed three-piece suit and pearl necklace atmosphere that still establishes a gap in time from today. This is confirmed by Cole Porter's jazz music as well as the black-and-white background pictures of a village road, a Gothic churchyard, a cosy cottage interior with a library full of books, and a 1950s hospital ward (though an anachronistic sound of an electrocardiogram can be heard throughout).
The production evidently opted for limited means in terms of scenery and props, most likely dictated by the technical conditions of the performance, since even rehearsals had taken place online and the entire cast never met in præsentia (this is something I learnt thanks to the possibility offered after the show to stay on and chat with some company members, as you would in the theatre bar, though you will need to bring your own bottle).
This sobriety is notably visible in the character of Dog (Ryan Duncan) whose only canine trait (apart from barking) is the use of plastic vampire teeth, no doubt as a nudge to modern supernatural clichés. Another device to signify the irruption of the supernatural in the play is the use of a red filter and superimposed smoke when the Dog first appears, and later when Frank stabs Susan under the devil's influence, or when Susan's ghost appears to Frank in the hospital. The demonic influence is also interestingly conveyed by overlapping the pictures of the Dog and Sawyer so they end up speaking as one, a visual symbol of demonic possession that might also suggest that it was all the very coinage of the poor woman's brain.
To me, the most interesting innovation in this staging of the play concerned the treatment of Dog, doubling as Justice of the Peace in Act 4, though here it is more than a mere doubling of roles, since the scene carries on without transition to the dialogue between Dog and the witch. Thus justice is itself corrupted by the devil and such a reading is further confirmed in the final scene, replacing Winifred's epilogue, when Dog dresses in clergyman's clothes to deliver his contemptuous and ironical epilogue ending on ‘Lord Jesus Christ save and defend your little flock. Amen’. A very subtle way of playing on the inherent palindromic pun but also of denouncing a community that sentences a poor old woman to death despite an obvious lack of evidence and pardons a bigamous murderer because they take pity on his love.
Before the show began, the audience were warned of the risk of technical issues, and so it happened during my evening. In Act 5, Old Carter's screen suddenly froze, provoking a forced interlude very much in keeping with old BBC screens, though the font was rather reminiscent of the first video games from the late 1970s. Still, the show resumed after a minute or two without marring the pleasure of the experience. After all, similar bugs occur in theatre shows that use digital technologies onstage.
Despite those technical limitations (bound to recede as technologies improve), The Witch of Edmonton was a success and Creation Theatre must be thanked for exploring new ways of bringing a dramatic experience to audiences around the globe that cannot pay a visit to the London one. With their new play, the company made sure that digital online performance has a promising future.