Nights punctuated by the occasional
stabbing, virtually everyone shagging two different people, the devil
himself walking abroad… Not much has changed in Edmonton in 400 years.
The insalubrious district of north London a mile or so from where I
live was in 1621 a Middlesex village which had recently witnessed the
indictment and execution of one Elizabeth Sawyer for witchcraft. A
version of her story forms one of three plot strands in this Jacobean
tragicomedy; in the others, the nice but dim Cuddy Banks also
encounters Mother Sawyer’s infernal familiar (who takes the form of,
and is listed in the
dramatis
personae as, Dog – Jay Simpson with a fine body-paint job), and
Frank Thorney is seduced by his own tormenting selfishness into bigamy
and then murder.
Textual analysis suggests that each of the strands was written by one
of the three credited playwrights: Thomas Dekker, Thomas Rowley and
John Ford. This is, I’m afraid, one of the period’s works in which the
authorial collaboration is most obtrusive. Ford’s “Frank” strand in
particular often feels overwritten, especially when the lines are
delivered in a demotic accent, as they are in Gregory Doran’s
production which brings to a close the RSC’s “Roaring Girls” season.
Mother Sawyer is neither a girl, nor in Dekker’s account does she do
much roaring. She does, however, get some nicely sharp, matter-of-fact
rejoinders, which the venerable Dame Eileen Atkins delivers in an
acerbic mutter. Recognising that pretty much any elderly woman living
on her own was liable to be accused as a witch, Sawyer decides to go
for broke. I’d call it the principle of “give a dog a bad name”, except
that the canine motif is comprehensively overdone throughout the
script. Atkins exerts an understated command when she is onstage, which
is simply too seldom; more time is given to the Frank Thorney saga, in
which actors such as Ian Bonar and Faye Castelow consistently outshine
their material.
Above all, we’re accustomed – black revenge humour and Shakespearean
knottiness notwithstanding – to being able to differentiate between
comedy and tragedy in drama of this period. In this case, as we jump
from bewitched morris dancers to uxoricide, it feels less like variety
than muddle, as if the playwriting committee frankly needed to make up
their collective mind.
Written for the Financial
Times.