Theatre review: The Last Witch/The World Is Too Much/White Tea/Year Of The Horse/Little Johnny's Big Gay Musical

Published on Friday 28 August 2009 18:13

The Last Witch/The World Is Too Much/White Tea/Year Of The Horse/Little Johnny's Big Gay Musical

Royal Lyceum, Traverse, Assembly Rooms, Pleasance

THE Last Witch is not a duplicate of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, but Rona Munro's play is in similar territory. Instead of Salem, 1692, we're in Sutherland, 1727, where Janet Horne became the last woman legally to be executed for witchcraft in Britain. Responding to the mood of the 1950s, Miller used his witch trials as a metaphor for Senator McCarthy's pursuit of communists; Munro, by contrast, uses her Scottish story as a way of celebrating female defiance and making a case for the value of mystery in a rational world.

She has one advantage in that very little is known about Janet Horne, freeing the playwright to be as creative with the fictional Horne as she would be with any other character. Thus the play's greatest strength is in the fascinating, contradictory, opportunistic woman at its heart, a role that recalls Brecht's Mother Courage or one of Howard Barker's feisty female leads.

This Janet Horne is neither wholly likeable nor entirely hateful. Rather, she is her own woman, showing compassion as often as she acts from self-interest, and all the more charismatic for it. Played magnificently by Kathryn Howden, she is sexy, manipulative and stubborn, as prone to deluding herself as she is to convincing others of her magical powers. Like Frank in Brian Friel's Faith Healer, also showing in the Edinburgh International Festival, Horne gives the impression she might have a genuine supernatural gift hidden beneath all the baloney – Munro does not rule out the possibility of magic.

But what gives the play much of its tension – and where it differs significantly from The Crucible – is that nobody takes Horne's powers too seriously. Sure, her neighbours convince themselves she's put a spell on their cattle, but they've managed to live alongside her for 20 years without a serious falling out and are rather perturbed when she gets arrested. Her daughter Helen (Hannah Donaldson) is more overwhelmed by the force of her personality than she is duped by her claims to magic and eventually decides it's all hokum. Most influentially, Captain David Ross (Andy Clark), the man with the authority to seal her fate, is positively dismissive of the idea.

Horne, however, won't be boxed in. She is no more inclined to admit to witchcraft than she is to deny it. She likes the idea she has bewitched Ross into falling for her, just as much as she laughs at the thought of consorting with the devil. In truth, she is as harmless as a modern-day astrologer, but the mystique is part of her personality and she defends that to the last – especially when it means defending the vulnerable Helen, who has supernatural ideas of her own.

All of this, in Dominic Hill's sturdy, well acted production, gives the play its energy, but Horne is a character worthy of more than the plot Munro finds for her. Although the playwright is freed from the lack of information about the real Janet Horne, she is cornered by the inescapable fact of Horne's death. No modern audience is going to think such an execution justified, so there is no point arguing over the morality of it. Yet the plot trajectory – woman accused of witchcraft, woman found guilty – points only to that obviously unjust conclusion. By developing the daughter's story and suggesting she has her own powers to summon up the devil, Munro only muddies the rationalist waters. I don't imagine the playwright believes in the reality of Ryan Fletcher's interventionist devil, so what are we supposed to make of him?

The equal problem is that not very much happens. The playwright's language is rich, rounded and poetic, but the lack of action often makes it seem wordy rather than dramatic. There is an attempt to widen the scope of the play by placing a harpsichord player on stage, reminding us of the overlap between the age of superstition and the gentrified Age of Enlightenment that was in full swing in 18th century Edinburgh. Had there been more such interventions, the play would seem theatrically less one-dimensional and historically less rooted in its time. The degree to which it works is down to the force of the central character and the sparkle of Howden's performance.

Munro is also one of the contributors to the Traverse's The World Is Too Much, a series of rehearsed readings that, remarkably, has been attracting sell-out audiences to the studio theatre at 9am. Munro's The Basement Flat reunites Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon, the stars of David Greig's deliriously romantic Midsummer, for a half-hour of dystopian nightmare in which children run feral and the adults hide behind locked doors. Best among the readings I've seen is Greig's Brewers Fayre, a comic riff about adultery, in which the audience is cast in the role of the chorus and – very gamely – performs lines projected on a screen. Darling, we were marvellous.

Greig is not the only Scottish theatre-maker to be experimenting in form. Thanks to the Scottish government's Expo fund, there is a higher than average home-grown presence on the Fringe this year, giving a much needed profile boost to the national team.

Many are taking Greig's lead and involving the audience in novel ways. Causing the biggest stir is Nic Green's Trilogy (previously reviewed), a joyously offbeat celebration of feminism which ends with the women in the audience casting off their clothes in solidarity with the performers. Showing a little more decorum, Grid Iron gets the drinks in for the audience before Barflies, an afternoon of boozy Bukowski in the Barony Bar, while David Leddy's White Tea gets them kitted out in white kimonos to enter into the spirit of a story about a Scottish woman at large in Japan. In both cases, the setting is more resonant than the narrative, but it's great to see companies refusing to take anything for granted.

Tam Dean Burn's Year Of The Horse, meanwhile, makes us think twice about what a play can be. His tribute to the late illustrator Harry Horse is nothing more complicated than a screening of a year's worth of polemical Sunday newspaper cartoons accompanied by a soundtrack and a script taken directly from Horse's own writings. The actor has come to the inspired realisation that these brilliant cartoons – vicious, vital and varied – need no more adornment than that.

Sometimes all it takes is the charisma of a gifted performer – and they don't come more gifted than Johnny McKnight, whose Little Johnny's Big Gay Musical is a late-night delight. Accompanied by a three-piece band and full-voiced vocalist Natalie Toyne, McKnight recounts his life story like he was an X-rated Fred Astaire. Slick, well sung and very funny, his tales of sexual awakening could easily have been an exercise in narcissism, but comes across instead as a sweet study in vulnerability and self-discovery. v

The Last Witch, Royal Lyceum, run ended; The World Is Too Much, Traverse, until today; White Tea, Assembly Rooms, until tomorrow; Year Of The Horse, Assembly Rooms, until tomorrow; Little Johnny's Big Gay Musical, Pleasance, until today (and on tour) www.edinburgh-festivals.com