The play the Welkin by Lucy Kirkwood was presented by The Gweek Players and Touch Theatre in September 2021
We are transported to rural Norfolk in mid 18th century England - where a heinous murder has taken place where a man aided and abetted by his mistress have murdered the young daughter of a local lady who had been consigned to the young woman's care. Justice is perfunctory - the perpetrators were apprehended covered in the innocent's blood and proof seems undisputed and sufficient for the judges to convict more or less immediately and send the condemned to a spectacle at the local gibbet. The crowd heaves outside as the condemned man is duly hung from the gibbet, meanwhile within a procedural problem arises as the young woman condemned as an accomplice is heard to claim she is "quick with child". The law does not allow an innocent child to die in the womb and will transmute the sentence if the condemned woman is found to be pregnant, so the bailiff is instructed by the presiding judge to empanel 12 local ladies to establish the veracity of the pregnancy. If established the condemned woman will be transported to the colonies, if not she will follow her lover to the gibbet.
There follows a play which features twelve women locked in an upstairs room together, unable to leave, communicate outside or seek council until they have decided on the condemned's condition. Like the classic 1957 film noir "12 Angry Men" (directed by Sidney Lumet) the play explores, character. motive, indifference, pre-occupations and prejudices of the rural townsfolk. Some want to make a quick decision and get back to the threshing and potato picking, others have vested interests to serve, and still others are trying to establish a heirarchy of class and position.
As audience (and some of the women) we are beguiled into thinking summary (male) justice is unfeeling, sexist and the verdict, of joint venture, barbaric. But the playwright gradually reveals that the evidence is pretty damning....and then when finally the defendant arrives (played by Gemma Wright) she begins to convict herself through a mixture of ignorance and defiance. She begins to describe the murder .....she turns into a sort of Myra Hindley figure where the "joint venture" (with Ian Brady) for a modern audience is called to mind, and she seems to be using her pregnancy as a plank to "get off" and does not question her culpability - she argues her lowly despised bastard condition is sufficient excuse for her actions. She thirsts for life but also convicts herself from her own mouth
The play does not dabble in the satanism associated with the witchcraft trials of Salem and the Crucible, but it does acquaint us with some of the darkest areas of the human psycho-sexual obsessions.
There appears to be no motive, the young woman we discover is infatuated and more or less confesses to her complete dominance sexual and emotionally of her accomplice and almost Bacchic-like revelling and refusal to deny her culpability. She does not help herself by pleading to her female adjudicators, rather we see a struggle between the need for a just process and the sheer horror of the crime requiring retribution regardless of mitigating circumstances. The audience is forced to confront these dilemmas.
As the women vacillate and the evidence of the pregnancy ebbs and flows, the impatient crowd outside calls for blood. Meantime the victim turns out to have powerful friends who have infiltrated the room both with the women and by suborning the bailiff
This play is a challenge for a director. It requires the choreography of, and delineation of 12 female characters on stage for most of the play (with few exits and entrances - a notably dramatic one being that of the condemned woman). The tempo increases as disguises and power plays are uncovered and misrepresentations are made among the women
We have rural respectability thrust up against the filth and chaos of Hogarth-like squalor and depravity that this production conjures well of life in 18th centruy rural England .
Some dramatic tableaux reminiscent of Dutch interiors are achieved at critical points. The only discordant note in the production was the (in my view heavily mistaken) projection of modern political figures onto a screen in the final act (including Donald Trump, Ian Brady and other men) where the populist thirst for blood is rather heavy handedly compared to modern bogey-men. While betraying where the director's prejudices lie, it muddies the playwright's decidedly equivocal and subtle exploration of the morals of the era and our own.
The final perfunctory denouement reveals where real power lies and shows that the criminal justice system was as broken then as it seems to be now. Delay, however, was not one of its faults!
There were many good performances from female members of the cast....offering variety or character at once bitchy, self-interested, complacent, compassionate.....I was not attentive enough to identify which performer was in each character (apart from Sally Poppy played by the excellent Gemma Wright) ....so cannot select any for specific mention but as an ensemble it was a triumph for amateur dramatics in Cornwall
Cast List
Sally Poppy | Gemma Wright |
Fred Poppy/Dr Willis | Alex Wood |
Elizabeth Luke | Tabitha Lammas |
Coombes | Richard MacBlain |
Katy Luke/Mary Middleton/Lady Wax | Kelly Konik |
Justice | David Ivall |
Charlotte Cary | Tracey Hughes |
Ann Lavender | Louise Fulwell |
Helen Ludlow | Henrietta Sandford |
Emma Jenkins | Ali Mason |
Peg Carter | Maria Evelyn Tiplady |
Judith Brewer | Vicky Ellis |
Sarah Hollis | Aline Turner |
Sarah Smith | Vanda Trotman |
Kitty Givens | Katie Clucas |
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