Jane Wenham was reputedly the last woman in England to be tried for witchcraft. This trial in 1712 was an immediate cause célèbre, setting those who insisted on the existence of malign spirits against their enlightened counterparts. Wenham was an impoverished 70-year-old widow from Walkern, Hertfordshire, with a reputation for herbal cures and cursing. When a local farmer accused her of being ‘a witch and a bitch’, Wenham demanded the local magistrate bring a charge of defamation. This, however, resulted in her being accused of witchcraft with locals queuing up to claim that dead sheep and poorly children were all the result of her pact with Satan.
Both the rector of Walkern, the Reverend Godfrey Gardiner and the Reverend Francis Bragge, the fanatical curate of Biggleswade, believed in witchcraft and gave evidence against Wenham at her trial at the Hertford Assizes. The judge, Sir John Powell, thought the case ludicrous, making sardonic remarks throughout. When Wenham was accused of flying, for instance, he pointed out there was no law against it. Nonetheless he found her guilty and issued a death sentence. Yet he immediately set aside the penalty and sought a royal pardon. This was forthcoming and Wenham lived out her final twenty years under the protection of Earl Cowper.
The same year saw the publication of both the anonymous The Impossibility of Witchcraft and a Hertfordshire physician’s A Full Confutation of Witchcraft: More Particularly of the Depositions against Jane Wenham. Francis Bragge responded with A Defense of the Proceedings against Jane Wenham, Wherein the Possibility and Reality of Witchcraft are Demonstrated from Scripture, raging against ‘frothy Libertines’ who denied the existence of witchcraft. In 1718, Francis Hutchinson, Bishop of Down and Connor, published a full-length study, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft, in which he used the case of Jane Wenham as one example amongst many.
Such, in outline, are the details.
A trial for witchcraft has an obvious dramatic lure, but it takes a bold playwright to make something new in the shadow of Arthur Miller. Rebecca Lenkiewicz is certainly bold. Her previous works for theatre include The Night Season (The Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award) and Her Naked Skin, the first play written by a woman to be staged at the National’s Olivier Theatre. She co-wrote the Oscar-winning film Ida with Pawel Pawlikowski.
Lenkiewicz has a particular interest in the lives of marginalised women and does not shy from showing on-stage scenes of violence – Her Naked Skin included the brutal force-feeding of suffragettes. In a 2013 Guardian interview she agreed that her interest is more in individuals than in narrative or plot, and this, one feels, is what weakens the potential drama of Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern, which she designed as a touring production with a cast of just eleven characters.
Although the historical facts offer dramatic possibilities with two zealous clergymen set against the urbane Judge Powell, Lenkiewicz ditches the superstructure of the ecclesiastical debate in Jane Wenham. She replaces real-life witch-hunting Gardiner with Bishop Francis Hutchinson. But this is not the Bishop Hutchinson of history. Her Hutchinson, likeably played by David Acton, seems the voice of reason, but he is, alas, tainted with the cupidity of all men. Here he has a servant Kemi Martha (Cat Simmons), a freed slave, beautiful, dignified and given to singing snatches of John Donne. She is the object of his somewhat fumbling patriarchal lust (“You look terribly tired … An early night, perhaps?”). In Lenkiewicz’s text, but cut from the production, there is a nod to the real Hutchinson’s humanitarian efforts in rural Ireland, but here he’s reduced to an ineffectual figure. Judge Powell makes no appearance.
The real Reverend Bragge is replaced for no obvious reason by the fictional Samuel Crane. Reverend Crane, like Bragge, is all fanaticism. Playing him, Tim Delap has the unenviable task of delivering an assortment of theological opinions and occasionally suggesting spontaneous prayer. He too harbours lustful urges, in his case for the buxom Widow Higgins (Rachel Sanders).
Lenkiewicz throws everything into the mix: an additional condemned witch (hanged just before the play starts), a drowned child, a bit of post-colonialism and very generous helpings of illicit sex. Local gossips, Priddy Goodstern (Judith Coke) and Bridget Hurst (Rachel Sanders again) moonlight as witches, luring the hapless Ann Thorn, daughter of the hanged woman, to their coven. The three meet to share sexual fantasies of congress with Satan (“He rode me as though I was his prize. His kingo it was like a broom handle”).
Such scenes under Ria Parry’s lively direction are enjoyably comic. But this has the effect of repeatedly undermining the play’s serious purpose. There are pantomimic moments where the humourless Crane keeps happening upon canoodling couples. As he yet again drops by the Widow Higgins’ inn (“I’ll just have water”), you want to tell him to look in the woods where the real shenanigans are taking place.
The Widow Higgins also offers unprofessional comfort to another fictional character, Fergal McGuire (Andrew Macklin). Quite what an Irish Catholic farmhand is doing in this neck of the woods is anybody’s guess, but he has a nice line in seductive ‘Oirish’ mythology (“My mother used to tell us stories … God we loved them. She told us all the adventures of Young Tuan”). He also has a vision of a better life that many an eighteenth-century farmhand would surely have envied:
Fergal: We should leave here. Just go. Leave it all behind.
Widow: To leave would be real life, wouldn’t it? To breathe in new air.
The sexual politics run into trouble here, as Fergal is married to Bridget, mother of Effie, whose death by drowning is one of the play’s many dramatic climaxes. But Bridget doesn’t deserve too much sympathy, as we’ve seen her on nights off from her baby farm, swapping devil-fantasies and swigging liquor with Priddy as previously noted. There again, Lenkiewicz suggests men are really to blame. Priddy is revealed to be the victim of childhood sexual abuse and the balance of Bridget’s mind is disturbed by multiple miscarriages.
The truth behind the apparent personality disorder suffered by Ann Thorn is that her mother was a prostitute. So it’s no wonder that Ann confesses to Jane Wenham her secret attraction to women:
Jane: And have you known a woman?
Ann: Once. For a few days. It was like something from heaven. Bliss it was, Jane.
Here we run into the main flaw of the play. Lenkiewicz intends her heroine Jane Wenham (Amanda Bellamy) to be a proto-feminist. She is, as we’d expect, the embodiment of feistiness. This is expressed in her wearing funny clothes and being a bit of a loner, known to sleep with James, her cockerel. But she is warmly maternal towards orphan Ann, and generally chatty and amiable. With her possets and liniments, she is clearly nature’s true apothecary. But none of this suggests why the other women of the village suddenly turn against her.
Thus the essential dramatic pivot has to be a falling out between Jane Wenham and Ann Thorn – there needs to be a dramatic reason for Ann to accuse Wenham of witchcraft. So Wenham has to react with unsisterly disgust to Ann’s self-confessed same-sex proclivities (“Evil it is. A canker. You get rid of that rot”). Subsequently there’s a scene of gratuitous violence when the imprisoned Wenham is pricked to prove she’s a witch. When her royal pardon comes through, and Wenham is offered what must have been spectacularly generous assistance (“Her Majesty is a most forward-thinking woman” Bishop Hutchinson tells her) she comes over all republican (“I am no one’s monkey. I don’t care if they have crowns or acres, I will not perform to a forced tune”).
Too frequently Lenkiewicz allows her interest in telling multiple stories to muddy her focus, and distort her historical research. The frequently anachronistic dialogue (“His Grace thinks you are fit for purpose”; “I don’t know why you’re being so strident”) jars with the occasional attempts at period speech rhythms (“Then she did choke. And then they did cheer”). Sadly, this play is not one for eighteenth-century purists.
Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern is at the Arcola Theatre, London, until January 30th 2016. Monday – Saturday evenings at 7:30pm (£19 / £15 concessions), Saturday matinees at 3:00pm (£17 / £14 concessions). For more information, see the Arcola website.