Witches and Women of the Night

Witches and their travails seemed to have become flavour of the month once again, certainly in this neck of the woods where Witchfinder received its first tentative re-showing in its new truncated 49-minute version. The other day I also watched The Witches of Eastwick on DVD, and witchery was also the theme of The Lady's Not for Burning, Dedham Players 40th anniversary production and one harking back to 1972 when they first performed it, so it's something of an old favourite for them.

The story concerns a disillusioned warrior, Thomas Mendip (Les Chisnall) - who happens to also be the Devil - who wishes to be hung for committing murder, but the far bigger finger of suspicion of the townsfolk falls upon Jennet Jourdemayne (Charlotte Still), who displays all the supposed signs of witchery, such as talking to animals. The Dedham Assembly Rooms are used to innovative and atmospheric effect with a two-sided stage erected in the middle of the Hewitt Hall, and a fine cast of capable Dedham stalwarts and some bright new faces catch the eye, although the themes of this semi-poetic and allegorical play (written by Christopher Fry 3 years after the end of World War II) seemed hard to translate through to the audience.

Then again, there have been the similarly unfortunate female victims of the Suffolk murderer, recently serialised on BBC Television. The prescience of the Suffolk Murders prevented Kerry King from staging Ron Pember and Dennis de Marney's version of Jack the Ripper at the Manifest Theatre in Manningtree in 2007, so instead it was atmospherically re-staged at the Headgate Theatre in Colchester last week, a combination of caustic music hall revue (reminiscent of Oh! What a Lovely War) and dramatic depiction of the East End background to the Ripper murders - an area riddled with poverty and deprivation on almost every corner, so that it was an ideal hunting ground for the Ripper's infamous crimes. The play cleverly sidetracks from naming the Ripper in person (as he was never actually found, of course), although it strongly implies that over-zealous evangelist Montague Druitt (Will Parrick) fits the bill, who is looking to clean up Whitechapel either one way, or the other.

In the case of both Jack the Ripper and The Lady's Not for Burning, it is less a case of who the actual criminal is, but what the impoverished and sometimes misguided society perceives him to be. (Indeed, the name "Jack the ripper" was coined by one of the many hoax letter writers.)

As the Suffolk Murders have sadly demonstrated, the women are still the victims, even in these enlightened days of equality, particularly in the more impoverished areas, then as now.