Two things stand out in this rare revival of a 1621 play by Rowley, Dekker and Ford. One is the sombre beauty of Gregory Doran’s production, which anchors the play firmly in its original period. The other is the brooding presence of Eileen Atkins as the titular witch. My only doubts concern the quality of the play itself.
It has the merit of topicality, since it was based on the real-life case of Mother Sawyer who was hanged at Tyburn as a witch. The play also unequivocally shows how a persecuted old woman becomes the thing of which she is accused. As she says, “Tis all one to be a witch as to be counted one.” But the play’s tripartite authorship means you can see the stylistic joins. Dekker, presumably, wrote the Mother Sawyer scenes; Ford the main sub-plot about Frank Thorney, who bigamously marries a pregnant servant and a yeoman’s daughter for her money; and Rowley weighed in with the low-life antics about a gullible rustic.
Collaboration was common in Jacobean theatre, but here the mixed authorship gives the play a strange switchback quality. It makes the point that English rural life was a hotbed of greed, lust and prejudice, but, although the play’s segments are united by the presence of a devilish black dog who acts as the witch’s familiar, his role constantly changes. One moment he’s a prankish mutt dispatching people into horse-ponds, the next he’s an active agent of evil inciting murder and then he becomes the embodiment of humanity’s darkest desires.
One wonders if the three authors ever worked out the significance of their chief symbol. I only wish there were more of Mother Sawyer, whom Atkins plays superbly. She captures the character’s mix of vulnerability, vengefulness, craving for canine affection (”Let’s tickle,” she says to her dog) and sharp eye for hypocrisy: Atkins is at her very best when, with her fiercely challenging gaze, she attacks an acquisitive society and, specifically, city wives “in one year wasting what scarce twenty win”. It’s a richly textured performance, and Atkins’s footsteps are memorably dogged by Jay Simpson as her upstanding familiar whose performance, given its testicular prominence, I’m tempted to describe as the dog’s bollocks. Ian Bonar as the duplicitous Frank, Ian Redford as a beefy farmer, Faye Castelow as his abused daughter and Dafydd Llyr Thomas as an endearing chump heavily into morris-dancing provide strong support. But, while I’m glad to have seen the play for the first time in more than 30 years, it’s a rum piece chiefly memorable on this occasion for Atkins’s glittering eye and savage exposure of the world’s wickedness.
• Until 29 November. Box office: 0844 800 1110. Venue: Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon.
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