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by Jen Silverman, directed by Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Distillery District, Toronto

February 5–March 1, 2026

Mother Sawyer: “’Tis all one / To be a witch as to be counted one” (The Witch of Edmonton, 1621)

Soulpepper is currently presenting Witch, a play from 2018 by non-binary American playwright Jen Silverman. Witch is referred to as a “modern take on Jacobean drama”, namely the 1621 play The Witch of Edmonton by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford. In fact, Silverman merely takes on a few plot elements and only six of the original’s 16 named characters to fashion a completely different play that has little to with its source. While Silverman’s play is well performed, only one of the play’s two plots strand holds any interest. Strangely enough, Silverman’s “modern take” on the older play proves to be superficial and less satisfying than the play from 400 years ago.

The Witch of Edmonton is one of a small group of 16th- and 17th-century plays known to be based on current events. Other such plays include Arden of Faversham (1592) of unknown authorship based on a real murder that occurred in 1551 and The Roaring Girl (1611) by Thomas Middleton based on the doings of a real-life female thief alive at the time of the play. All three were performed to great acclaim by the Royal Shakespeare company in 2014 in a season dedicated to this type of play, but none have been staged at our own Stratford Festival.

The title character in the original play is based on Elizabeth Sawyer, known as Mother Sawyer, was accused of causing the death of Ann Ratcleife by magic. A demon in the form of a dog named Tom was said to be her familiar. When women helping the court found a so-called witch’s mark on Sawyer, she was judged guilty and hanged in 1621.

By December of the same year the play by Rowley, Dekker and Ford was produced. As Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster points out in her perceptive Director’s Note, what is most remarkable about the original play is the sympathy that the authors show toward Sawyer. They depict Sawyer being insulted, cursed and accused of being a witch even before she makes a pact with a devil. She is fully aware that people revile her because she is a simply a poor, old woman. When Tom, a devil in the form of a dog, asks if she would like to take revenge on those who abuse her, she agrees and sells her soul to Tom, though she is disappointed that Tom is not authorized to kill anyone for her.

Though Sawyer is the title character, most of the play is devoted to two other plots. The main plot concerns a young man named Frank Thorney, who, while in service to Sir Arthur Clarington, has got a fellow servant, Winnifred, pregnant and has married her. Frank wants to keep his marriage a secret from his father who wants him to marry a rich woman whose dowry will pay off his debts. As it happens, Susan, the woman Frank’s father would like him to marry, is already in love with Frank. To please his father and to acquire Susan’s dowry he marries her, Frank’s idea being that with this money he and Winnifred can run away together. When Susan catches Frank escaping with her dowry money with Winnifred, Frank murders Susan and claims that his former rivals for Susan’s hand were the killers.

The truth is soon discovered and Frank is arrested and condemned to death. Sawyer is also arrested and condemned to death for killing an enemy Ann Ratcliffe, though in fact, Tom, at her behest, drove Ann insane after which she committed suicide. Both are hanged the same day. Frank is showered with forgiveness by those he wronged. Sawyer receives no sympathy and goes to her death alone. The question that the authors pose is “Who is the evil one of the two? Is it Frank the conscious bigamist and murderer or is it an old woman who seeks revenge on those who have wronged her?” In numerous speeches given to Sawyer, she points out that wealthy men commit crimes that would be laid down to witchcraft were they committed by poor people. Tom himself claims that the devil needs take on no outward form to be present. He lives in any ill thoughts or actions: “As thy tongue slandering, bearing false witness, / Thy hand stabbing, stealing, cozening, cheating,— / He’s then within thee”.

The play’s third plot is comic and involves the clown Cuddy Banks, a Morris dancer, who is hopelessly in love with Susan’s sister and, unlike his father, Old Banks, is kind to Mother Sawyer. He agrees to sell his soul to Tom but Tom deems Cuddy too innocent to accept it and instead plays tricks on him for his entertainment.

Silverman’s Witch has nowhere near the richness of incident or language present in the original play. In Witch, Tom, now called Scratch, takes on the form of a handsome young man and, unlike the original, becomes a major character. He tempts Sawyer, Frank and Cuddy with rewards for selling their souls. Frank and Cuddy accept, whereas Sawyer, unlike the original, does not sell her soul after numerous entreaties from Scratch.

Silverman compresses the Frank and Cuddy plots by rolling the three father-figures of the original into one, namely Sir Arthur Banks. Banks is Cuddy’s father, as in the original, but he, rather than any Sir Arthur Clarington, is also Frank's employer and patron. The would-be source of comedy in Witch is the fact that Sir Arthur so clearly favours Frank over his own son Cuddy. Sir Arthur especially wants an heir and he seems to think that Frank rather than Cuddy will be able to achieve that goal. Besides this, we, unlike Sir Arthur, know that Cuddy is gay. As in the original, Frank is married to the pregnant Winnifred and plans to marry a rich woman for her dowry. Unlike the original, he repudiates his marriage with Winnifred and he does not murder his never-seen fiancée.

What is most disappointing in terms of plot is that Scratch’s agreements with Cuddy and Frank have no effect. We do have to wonder, “What is the point of a play where people sell their souls to the devil if he does not give them power or collect his debt?” Silverman’s moving of the comic Cuddy plot into the originally serious Frank-Winnifred plot has the effect of making the entire situation ludicrous. At the same time, Silverman isolates Mother Sawyer from all the characters except Scratch and, briefly, Winnifred at the end. We thus do not see any of the verbal and physical abuse Sawyer suffers at the hands of the Sir Arthur.

Silverman’s primary innovation is to frame the relation of Scratch and Sawyer as a love story. In the original Sawyer and Tom do say they love each other in the general, non-romantic way the word was used in the 17th century. Silverman, however, has Scratch, who as a demon has no heart as he points out, actually fall in love with Sawyer. As a result, the Scratch-Sawyer plot which has the least relation to any plot in the original, becomes the most interesting plot in Silverman.

Silverman suggests that Scratch becomes attracted to Sawyer because she is the only person who has ever rebuffed his temptation of power on earth. We also discover that Scratch is not particularly happy in his present existence as a minor devil rather low on the demonic hierarchy. In portraying the afterlife as bureaucracy, Silverman covers no new ground since that trope has appeared in movies and television from Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) to Beetlejuice (1988) to The Good Place (2016-20).

Rather than the ironic parallel in the original between the evil non-witch Frank and the non-evil witch Sawyer, Silverman presents just a contrast between the awkward comedy and exaggerated action of the world of Sir Arthur and the deeper conversations and subtle playing of Sawyer’s world. Tantoo Cardinal as Sawyer and Nicholas Eddie as Scratch are the only two characters who hold our attention because their characters’ relations are not undermined by farce. Cardinal is a wise, warm, down-to-earth presence as Sawyer, who, though deemed a “witch”, is paradoxically the best representative of humanity in the play. Cardinal brings out the resignation in Sawyer who is all too familiar with the world’s injustice to think it will ever change.

Eddie, in a great change from his obsessive character in Tracy Letts’s Bug last year, plays Scratch as a suave, velvet-toned gentleman who easily sees through people’s pretenses, except, of course, for Sawyer who has none. Though the idea of a young, handsome devil falling in love with an aged, poverty-stricken woman might seem impossible, Eddie makes the situation believable by emphasizing how Sawyer’s presence has such a calming influence on Scratch that it makes him long for the kind of serenity Sawyer embodies.

While the acting of the characters in Sir Arthur’s world is pushed to the point of caricature, the most impressive performance comes from Shawn Ahmed as Frank. Ahmed clearly has fun making Frank the most annoyingly smug egotist imaginable. The usually reliable Oliver Dennis does what he can with the oddly written role of Sir Arthur, who Silverman has written as both doddering and mean. Silverman gives Sir Arthur a long soliloquy while holding the ashes of his late wife that Silverman is unable to make even mildly amusing.

Sir Arthur’s true son, Cuddy, is meant to be comic but Thomas Mitchell Barnet’s performance that veers between whining and shouting prevents what little humour there is in the role from coming out. Silverman also gives Cuddy a pointless scene showing off the character’s love of Morris dancing which very quickly outstays its welcome.

It is really left to Heeyun Park 박희윤 to inject some modicum of real emotion in the Sir Arthur scenes and, though Silverman has underwritten the part, Park makes the most of the few words Silver gives her.

Ting-Huan 挺歡 Christine Urquhart’s costumes place the action in its original 17th-century setting except for the Louis XIV wig she gives Sir Arthur which does not accord with the period at all. The stage in the Michael Young Theatre at the Young Centre has been arranged for alley staging. In the long playing area between the two ranks of audience seating, set designer Nick Blais has place a circular pit which Lancaster uses as a well, a pond, a fire-pit and the entrance to hell. The trouble that the pit is so large it functionally keeps Sir Arthur’s world and Mother Sawyer’s world completely separate and inhibits natural movement from one side of the stage to the other.

Recent playwrights seem to like to adapt old plays to give them a modern spin. With Witch, virtually no one will know the 1621 play that Silverman is giving a spin to. We see actors in period costume speaking like modern teenagers overusing the word “like”. Unfortunately Silverman’s wit extends only to such obvious anachronisms.

When I saw the drama students of York University stage The Witch of Edmonton in 2011, I wondered why the play is not more often revived. Having seen Jen Silverman’s Witch, I still wonder the same thing. The earlier play is more multifaceted and morally complex. Besides, it is not remarkable for a play from 2018 to see the social reasons behind the persecution of witches. However, it is a revelation to see a play written the same year a “witch” was hanged question the church’s and the government’s own views of witchcraft. Lancaster and this very cast would be perfect as the core of a remount of the 1621 play if that ever were to happen.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Nicholas Eddie as Scratch and Tantoo Cardinal as Mother Sawyer; Tantoo Cardinal as Mother Sawyer and Nicholas Eddie as Scratch; Shawn Ahmed as Frank and Thomas Mitchell Barnet as Cuddy; Tantoo Cardinal as Mother Sawyer and Nicholas Eddie as Scratch; Heeyun Park as Winnifred and Thomas Mitchell Barnet as Cuddy. © 2026 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.soulpepper.ca.