Voltaire once claimed: "The composition of a tragedy requires testicles." To which Byron retorted: "If this be true, Lord knows what Joanna Baillie does - I suppose she borrows them." If ballsiness is an artistic attribute, then Baillie's Witchcraft - published in 1836, when she was over 70 - certainly seems well endowed.
Even in her own day Baillie, born in Lanarkshire but based in Hampstead, was seen as a literary lady with little natural gift for the stage. On this evidence, I would say that is a harsh judgment. If anything, her play suffers from an excessive theatricality. It deals with false accusations of witchcraft in a superstition-ridden Scotland. The innocent Violet, seen on the moors at night talking to what appears to be a ghost, becomes a candidate for burning. Baillie pulls out all the stops: we get violent storms, a scheming villainess and a deluded satanic crone.
It would be easy to mock the play's absurdities. You wonder, for instance, how Violet's father, who is on the run, gets to hear of her impending death. But Baillie has an unquenchable vitality; she paints a horrific picture of a Scotland, presumably before the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1736, where women could be burned on the flimsiest of evidence.
In Bronwen Carr's boisterous revival, Stephanie Farrell ensures that the heroine is no shrinking Violet. Her chief accuser is opulently performed by Allison McKenzie, who fixes us all with baleful stares. There is good support from Scott Ainslie and Holly de Jong.
It is robustly enjoyable, Walter Scott-style stuff. But it is not until Wednesday, when Imogen Bond's revival of Baillie's De Monfort opens at the Orange Tree Theatre in west London, that we will be able to judge whether the playwright passes Voltaire's testicular test.
· Until May 10. Box office: 0844 847 1652.
