Theatre review: The Last Witch

Published on Monday 24 August 2009 01:36

**** ROYAL LYCEUM THEATRE

AT THE end of Rona Munro's The Last Witch, the great curtain that circles the stage fills with darkness, the image of the beating wings of a thousand crows gathering to peck out the eyes of their victims. It's a fitting end to a play which may have been created by Munro and the Traverse Theatre Company for this year's Edinburgh International Festival, but which effectively turns its back on the theme of Enlightenment, to show two systems of bitter and sometimes savage unreason locked in timeless conflict.

Set in Dornoch in 1727, the play is based on the true story of Janet Horne, the last woman to be burned as a witch in Scotland. But instead of dramatising the conflict between a superstitious belief and the gathering forces of science and reason – or the strangely topical debate on mercy hinted at in one scene – Munro offers a powerful, poetic and unsettling supernatural thriller, in which the patriarchal savagery of the men who take Janet's life is matched and trumped by other powers, called up by Janet's teenage daughter, Helen.

In Janet – thrillingly played by Kathryn Howden – Munro creates a complex and compelling character, visibly divided between a common-sense vision of herself as comely widow who happens to have a gift for uttering colourful curses, and a lingering belief in her own magical powers. And around her circle the men: the spiteful neighbour, the cowardly minister, the new young sheriff who is to be her nemesis, and the strange male figure called up by her daughter, a classic Scottish devil in black who follows, woos, cajoles.

There's something primal here, a sense of the old Furies of Greek tragedy coming to wreak their vengeance on the male-dominated order of things. But unlike Aeschylus, Munro holds out no vision of the civic peace that might some day reign between men and women. And for all the fine acting on view in Dominic Hill's production, for all the power of Naomi Wilkinson's Faust-like design, with its cold flames licking up from hell, it's finally difficult to know how to take a play that never once emerges into the clear light of day. Unless we take it as a cry of despair; or an assertion that reason cannot heal the brutal wounds of past injustice, and that vengeance, black in wing and claw, will eventually have its day.

&#149 Until 29 August, 7:30pm. Matinees on 27 and 29 August, 2:30pm.