Rona Munro’s play The Last Witch tells of Scotland’s last witch burning, but really it’s about sex and power
What fascinates Dominic Hill about witchcraft is not the cauldrons, the broomsticks or the frogs, but women’s power over men. He is interested in women’s ability to scare them silly.
“The male fear of the witch is really down to men’s fear of women’s sexuality, isn’t it?” he says. “Men don’t like to admit any loss of power, so rather than say they were under someone’s spell, in those days, they would accuse her of being a witch.”
Hill, the artistic director of the Traverse theatre, is talking about The Last Witch, the play he brings to the Festival this month. Written by Rona Munro, it tells the story of Janet Horne, the last woman to be burnt for witchcraft in Scotland.
One of the most pertinent scenes, he says, takes place inside the prison where Horne is held. She is talking with the sheriff, with whom she had a fling, but she now senses he holds a grudge against her. “Did you fancy me?” she asks him and, the way Hill tells it, it is obvious her tone is taunting him. “You deny it now, but does that mean you admit you were bewitched by me?”
Hill says: “For me, that scene is central to what the play is about.”
He promises an “earthy, salty, muddy” production. As you would expect from a theatre that prides itself on new writing, The Last Witch is a very modern play that happens to be set in Dornoch, in the Highlands, in 1727.
Scotland was still burning women when other parts of Europe had stopped doing it over a hundred years earlier.
“It’s not some 18th-century history lesson. We aren’t attempting to recreate an authentic, historically accurate piece, with people speaking in Gaelic,” says Hill. “This is our version of 1727. It’s much more about being truthful to the characters.”
Jonathan Mills, the artistic director of the Edinburgh International Festival, commissioned the play. This year’s theme is the Enlightenment, so Mills was keen to include elements of what he calls the “endarkenment”, to properly define the era.
“I remember learning about the Scottish Enlightenment at school in Australia,” he says. “It left an impression on me; it seemed Scotland had made a really powerful cultural, scientific and ideological contribution to the world during that time.”
It wasn’t until years later that he learnt about Scotland’s witch trials. “I was shocked to discover that the witch trials went on until such a late stage,” he says. “Scotland was still burning women when other parts of Europe had stopped doing it over a hundred years earlier.”
He wanted to create a project that focused on the trials and approached Munro, one of Scotland’s leading contemporary playwrights, who said it was “right up her alley”.
When the play was still in its fledgling stages, the pair spent a lot of time discussing what the play would involve. When Munro began looking into the topic, she found three broad categories of “witch”.
Mills explains: “There were those who were called a witch because of physical abnormalities.
“Then there were others who were victim of some hideous personal vendetta; calling them a witch was a thinly veiled way of persecuting them.”
But it was the third group, those who were proud to be called witches and stood up to anyone who tried to challenge them, that Mills and Munro were most interested in.
“Suddenly it became this far more interesting proposition, with almost a slight suffragette feel, and I stepped back and left Rona to approach it however she saw fit.”
With Munro writing the play, Mills knew he wanted Hill to direct after seeing his acclaimed production of Peer Gynt at the Dundee Rep. “I was bowled over by its muscular weirdness,” he says. “I thought, here is a guy who can handle goblins and underworlds, and bring great imaginative power to them. He just seemed so appropriate, I’m delighted he was able to get involved.”
The play, which will receive its world premiere when it opens at the Royal Lyceum on August 23, is the first Traverse production on the Edinburgh International Festival programme since 1999.
Although Munro’s script was inspired by history, she wanted to build up a fictional plot around the concrete facts, and make the story more human. Munro also realised that the details surrounding Horne’s life are pretty scant. Her real name is not even clear, as the names Jenny or Janet Horne were often given to women in the north of Scotland labelled as witches.
What is known is that Horne had a daughter, born with a genetic defect that gave her deformed hands. The rumours doing the rounds at the time were that Horne rode on her daughter’s back, like a horse, to visit the devil. Both mother and daughter were arrested and found guilty of witchcraft.
The daughter escaped but Horne was painted in tar, stretched over a barrel and paraded around her home town of Dornoch, before being burned alive. Although the real-life execution is still shrouded in mystery, it provided a springboard for a drama that explores gender roles, family and small-town life.
Kathryn Howden, the actress playing Horne, remembers reading the script for the first time and liking the unpredictability of Janet’s character. “She can be outrageous, short-tempered and a bit weird,” says the actress, who appeared recently in Be Near Me, the National Theatre of Scotland’s adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s novel.
“She alienates everyone at some point in the play. She is rubbish at tending her plot of land in the village, and the way she treats her daughter sometimes is terrible, but in a funny way I admire her. She has nerve and she is absolutely real. She’s the kind of person that people find themselves drawn to,” she says.
Howden, who is 48, also admits to loving the character for “very selfish reasons”. “Janet is a beautifully written character and one of those parts that rarely come up for women my age. If you transported her to Scotland today, she would probably be a bit new-agey, a bit hippie.”
As well as believing she has the ability to read people, Horne believes she can manipulate the power of sea and land, put curses on beasts and charm fish to jump out the sea. The script plays on the supernatural themes, where otherworldly forces are at work in the village, and the devil might just be walking among them.
It’s not the first time Munro has dabbled in fantasy. Her work for television includes a batch of episodes of Doctor Who 20 years ago.
“I see this production as a challenge — and a responsibility,” says Hill, “But I also believe Rona has written something very beautiful and poetic. It’s an epic play, on a grand scale. This is something exciting that talks about witches and devils, and I really enjoy that ambition and scope.”
Hill hopes The Last Witch will be recognised as an important Scottish play on a par with Blackbird or Damascus.
“It’s great to work with a writer who’s alive,” he laughs. “I have the chance to get that dialogue going about what the play should be like,” he says, before adding: “At the end of the day, everyone just loves a good witch story, don’t they?”
The Last Witch, Royal Lyceum, August 23-29, www.eif.co.uk