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by Caryl Churchill, directed by Adam Bailey

Royal Porcupine Productions, Young Centre, Toronto

November 21-29, 2008

Royal Porcupine Productions has given Caryl Churchill’s 1976 play Vinegar Tom its long overdue Toronto premiere.  While we have to be grateful to RPP for filling that lacuna, it’s a pity the production’s reach so far exceeds its grasp.

The play’s subject is witch-hunting in 17th-century England.  Anyone who has just seen Soulpepper’s recent revival of Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) will be fascinated to note how what is implied in that later play is made explicit in the earlier.  Churchill’s criticism of patriarchy and misogyny is overt in an inserted sketch where Heinrich Kramer (Annamieke Wade) and Jakob Sprenger (Paula Schultz), authors of the infamous treatise on witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum (1487), explain that witches are most often female because women are less capable of reason than men, more sensual and more prone to evil.  Yet, as in Top Girls, Churchill simultaneously indicts women who put personal success and wealth before female solidarity. Margery (Rosemary Doyle) has her eye on property owned by the old woman Joan (also Schultz).  If Margery can have Joan condemned as a witch, the property will be available.  Even worse, Goody (June Morrow), works actively as a “searcher,” seeking out women to be tried by the notorious witch-hunter Henry Packer (Joseph Ling).  In a side-plot with tragic consequences Margery’s husband Jack (Cameron Johnston) accuses Joan’s daughter Alice (Leah Wade) of witchcraft to explain his ungodly lust for her.

The play seems under-rehearsed, the pacing slow and the acting quite uneven.  Doyle, Wahl and Wade, in her main role as a wise herbalist, stand out for their clear sense of character and purpose.  The play finds Churchill in her most Brechtian mode, interspersing the action with songs that draw explicit morals from it.  K. Hillary Thomson has composed fine modern pop-country music for Churchill’s lyrics to link the play to the present.  The problem is that the songs are so poorly performed one wishes director Adam Bailey had either omitted them or given them to actors like Wahl or Jennifer McDonald whose voices are stronger than the band’s.  As it is, the play’s didacticism comes through but not the theatricality and emotion to balance it.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-11-25.

Photo: Rosemary Doyle and Cameron Johnston. ©Albert Lee.