Digital Performance and Diabolic Dogs: In conversation with the cast and crew of Creation Theatre’s The Witch of Edmonton — Part 1
by Gemma Allred & Benjamin Broadribb
Over the past two years, Oxford-based Creation Theatre Company have positioned themselves as pioneers of digital theatre created and performed in isolation during the UK COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Since their first digital show, The Tempest — a co-production with Portstewart-based Big Telly Theatre Company — Creation have staged several digital adaptations of early modern plays, including a rehearsed reading of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII in June 2020, directed by Laura Wright; The Duchess of Malfi in March 2021, co-directed by Wright and Natasha Rickman; and Romeo and Juliet in May 2021, directed by Rickman. Their latest digital production is an adaptation of William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford’s 1621 play The Witch of Edmonton. Emma Smith describes it as ‘a play preoccupied with the intersection between individual responsibility and social pressures’¹ — something which arguably couldn’t be more topical in the UK as the public readjusts once again to the lifting of lockdown restrictions. We spoke to six members of the cast and crew at the beginning of March, the week before the production opened, to find out about the process of adapting this seldom-staged play to the digital medium in 2022.
Lola Boulter — Winnifrede
Guy Clarke — Frank Thorney
Graeme Rose — Old Carter
Giles Stoakley — Old Thorney / Production Manager
Anna Tolputt — Mother Sawyer
Laura Wright — Director / Adaptation
After several Shakespeare productions and The Duchess of Malfi, why did you at Creation choose The Witch of Edmonton (TWoE) for your next early modern digital production?
Laura:
I’ve always wanted to do a production of TWoE so I was pushing for that pretty hard! [Creative Producer] Lucy [Askew] and I were talking for a long time about doing Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and had made quite a lot of plans with that, but at the eleventh hour decided that TWoE would be a shorter and more practical — and probably more fun — play to play with. I cut it down to around an hour, and then we started thinking about practical rehearsals. It’s been relatively quick: I think I suggested TWoE around four weeks ago, and cut it the week after that. I started doing mini rehearsals with Anna [Tolputt] and then full cast rehearsals the week after that, so it’s been really rapid.
Lola:
I think that there is something really comfortable in doing an older play, and especially a play that hasn’t been done online before and isn’t as well known.
Graeme:
Although I am familiar with a bit of Rowley, Dekker and Ford, I didn’t know it at all.
Giles:
There have been two experiences in my entire life where I’ve been able to do a classical text with an academic in the room — The Duchess of Malfi, and this — and the difference I find that it makes in the rehearsal process is just enormous. We all think that we understand classical plays relatively well, the verse and the imagery in them, and we can all look at our Shakespeare glossaries or Google. But actually having someone in the room who understands context and understands the genuine reasons behind a piece of text — language, rhythm, meter — that for me is a huge bonus for digital theatre because it’s just unaffordable in an in-person production. We have Laura who can tell us what stuff means, and the debate that that creates, and the kind of character progression that creates, is incredibly exciting.
Guy:
I would second that. Having worked with directors who are full of exciting, creative ideas, and not full of precise understanding of the text that they’re working on, it is really nice to have someone who does actually know exactly what pretty much all of the words mean. People are very keen on making early modern plays, particularly Shakespeare, speak to now, which I agree is important. But that doesn’t mean you can make a word mean something that it doesn’t mean, and I think lots of directors get very fast and loose with that in an effort to make texts fit their interpretation. The words that are there [in this production] mean what they’re supposed to, because Laura has a very deep understanding of what they do actually mean, and that’s really nice. It feels like we’re making this play for a modern audience, rather than taking an old play and then trying to make it into a different play for a modern audience. It feels very true to the original — like we’re paying our dues to what Dekker, Rowley and Ford meant, because Laura can tell us, rather than some directors who can’t.
Laura:
That is just lovely to hear, thank you! The whole point of all the conversations we have is that they are conversations. I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve had three casts with Creation [for Henry VIII, Malfi and TWoE], and the universal factor has been casts who ask questions and offer suggestions. I’m learning how to make digital theatre through collaboration, people chipping in, coming with ideas — certainly that’s been my experience of working with Creation. Being able to lean on the existing bank of knowledge about the technology and the visuals has been amazing for me.
Graeme:
For me, whatever the project is, I always try and ask myself: ‘Why now? Why us? Why here?’. I particularly love digging into historic early modern texts, partly because they’re so rich — it’s a world to explore and inhabit and pick apart. Coming from a devising, collaborative background, I don’t necessarily believe in the sanctity of the text, and I think it’s important to reframe, rethink and shake it up to find where the latency is in meaning. I’m really inspired by the challenge of doing that with early texts. particularly with TWoE, as it’s a hole in my own knowledge. It’s another piece of a jigsaw.
What has been your experience of adapting this play in particular into a digital format?
Graeme:
The character of Dog is the big problem to solve in staging the play! It’s not terribly easy — you have to explore the performative nature of that role and what’s going to work, what’s not going to work, and you have to make certain decisions for the digital medium. It’s about creating that kind of imaginative space with limited means — you have to try and allow the audience as much space to be able to make that leap themselves. You can’t give them too much, in a way.
Giles:
I totally agree. I still think it’s really important that we’re not making a film — it has been that way all the way through [since The Tempest in April 2020]. Just because it’s on Zoom and we can do effects, doesn’t mean that effects are a useful thing, or even worthwhile in the process. The most effective scenes we found with Ryan [Duncan], who’s playing Dog, is just good acting — there’s no substitute for it! As Graeme says, you have to make decisions quite quickly and they have to be interesting ones to justify doing the play. Dog is such a central role, but it’s still just an actor. We’re not doing animation, we’re not making a film, and it’s live, so there’s a limit to what you can do. Ryan’s skill is that he is slightly insane!
How has the audience response to your past early modern digital productions fed into the way that you’ve approached this particular adaptation?
Graeme:
With Malfi, we came up with a distinct aesthetic, which was borrowed from a filmic medium, but very self consciously. That allowed us the space to be able to liberate the material in a way, and play fast and loose with the visuals. We’ve been exploring how to do that with TWoE, which feels like a different beast. There is an additional strange, paradoxical complication to this production, in that we have the potential to have many performers in one space [as opposed to Malfi, where the performers were isolated from each other], so we have the option of real contact. That has strangely become more of a challenge! Whilst we’re really used to that in a physical theatre space, now we have to negotiate how that works in relationship to everyone else who is performing remotely.
Laura:
We had a conversation around the ‘rules’ of Dog and Mother Sawyer — the witch of the play’s title. Ryan and Anna are in the same space and they have the capacity to touch, so we’ve been thinking about how that creates a relationship between them that isn’t like everyone else’s. The rest of the cast are relatively isolated for at least parts of the production, and Ryan and Anna are the only two who ‘break’ that barrier. I think that has been useful in a way to give us a really weird intimacy between these two characters, especially because of the way I’ve cut the text. I’ve taken out the Cuddy Banks storyline, who would be a person other than Mother Sawyer who can see Dog. So, by not having that, there is a question mark over the relationship between Mother Sawyer and Dog. How much of this is in her mind? How much of it is it tangible? Are they speaking out loud when they’re speaking? What’s the link between them? Playing around with that in physical space has been weird and wonderful.
Anna:
I’m the most recent joiner to the world of digital performance, so I’m discovering it as we go along. It’s totally different to acting on stage, it’s totally different to acting on film. It feels to me like it works very nicely on a psychological level, in that it feels quite intimate, quite claustrophobic. An art installation is the closest thing that I can find to liken this production to. For example, where you would naturally be looking at another character in in-person performance, sometimes it makes sense not to. It’s a bit more stylized, and forces you to really highlight the words because of that as well.
You’ve updated the setting in your production from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. How did you go about choosing this time period, and, even though the setting isn’t the present day, how much did you want the production to speak to our current moment?
Laura:
Lucy and I had been talking about costumes that tapped into the fashion of ‘dark academia’. It was Graeme who said, ‘Well, that’s got a lot to do with the 1940s’, so it then became a conversation about creating a post-war world — this damaged society full of people trying not to think about the things that they’ve just been through, and being very suspicious of strangers. It gave us a period that isn’t now, and isn’t 1621 either; but is distant enough from now that we can think about witchcraft in a way that takes it seriously, and also think about women’s voices in a way that seems very contemporary. We’ve had a lot of conversations in rehearsals about things that would be anachronistic in either the ’40s or the 1620s. We’ve talked a lot about coercive relationships and women’s rights, and tried to bring those conversations up to date.
Graeme:
There feels like a clear connection to now, in a way. You get a very strong sense of there being the shadow of something looming over Edmonton in this interpretation — it could be a war, or it could be a plague. In some ways, the ‘Old’ guys are strangely ineffective at being able to act upon incidents. They don’t go out all out to avenge murders. There’s something very distant and cloying and repressed about the way they behave. There is enough damage to this society that people want to put a lid on things and not talk about what’s really happened.
Guy:
I think it’s a really interesting play for just what Graeme was saying. It’s not set in a world where, if someone does you wrong, you tear off and avenge them immediately! There’s more at stake than that — no one can afford in this community to just go around stabbing people, because this is a small town. There’s so much community pressure from the small-town hierarchy of status — what you can say and who you can say it to. That’s been really interesting to play with and feels very different to something like The Duchess of Malfi — all of those revenge tragedies feel like they’re from a different world.
Laura:
That’s a really good point. This is simmering rage, not grabbing your sword and racing out the door.
Graeme:
They’re very easily pointing the finger at an outsider, scapegoating somebody who’s not from within.
Guy:
Mother Sawyer is not bound by those ties. She’s a freer agent and therefore a more suspicious figure
Giles:
We’ve created a world where the people of Edmonton are a very set society and Mother Sawyer is the one who is isolated from that society. Having her able to be the one who can actually engage in physical contact with Dog is a really strange dichotomy. Isolation is actually, in this instance, what makes the village closer.
Gemma and Ben would like to offer their heartfelt thanks to Lola, Guy, Graeme, Giles, Anna and Laura for being so generous with their time in speaking to us. Look out for Part 2 of our conversation with the cast and crew of The Witch of Edmonton later this week!
Creation Theatre’s production of The Witch of Edmonton is currently running until Sunday 20 March 2022. Tickets and more information are available on Creation’s website.
Production Details:
The Witch of Edmonton
Presented by Creation Theatre Company via Auditorium (online platform), 9–20 March 2022. Directed by Laura Wright. With Lola Boulter (Winnifride), Guy Clark (Frank Thorney), Leda Douglas (Kate Carter), Ryan Duncan (Dog), Chloe Lemonius (Susan Carter), Graeme Rose (Old Carter), Giles Stoakley (Old Thorney), P.K. Taylor (Old Ratcliffe), Anna Tolputt (Mother Sawyer), and Amelia Fewtrill (Anne Ratcliffe).
[1] Emma Smith (2014) ‘Introduction’, in Women on the Early Modern Stage, vii-xix (xvii). London: Methuen Drama.
