Nicholas Eddie, left, plays the devil and Tantoo Cardinal is Elizabeth Sawyer in Witch at Soulpepper Theatre.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
- Title: Witch
- Written by: Jen Silverman
- Director: Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster
- Actors: Tantoo Cardinal, Shawn Ahmed, Thomas Mitchell Barnet, Oliver Dennis, Nicholas Eddie, Heeyun Park
- Company: Soulpepper Theatre
- Venue: Michael Young Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs to March 1
You’d be forgiven for walking into Witch, American playwright Jen Silverman’s satirical adaptation of a 17th-century play about the economics of dealing with the devil, without a rock-solid awareness of the play’s source material.
The Witch of Edmonton, written by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford in 1621, chronicled the life of Elizabeth Sawyer, who was brought to trial under King James I’s Witchcraft Act. Accused of fraternizing with Satan, she was convicted and eventually hanged, an event so sensational that its ripped-from-the-town-square stage adaptation came quickly after Sawyer’s death.
Witch, published in 2022, doesn’t expect you to know all that. But it also doesn’t fill in the gaps of its own context. Silverman’s adaptation has its moments – it’s occasionally funny, and to its credit, it’s quite short at under two hours – but the play’s commentary on its own source material is at times infuriating, and often makes Witch feel aloof and unfocused.
In the play, Elizabeth asks the devil what a soul is worth.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
That’s a shame, because Witch features excellent, layered performances from Nicholas Eddie and Tantoo Cardinal, as the devil and Sawyer, respectively. When they’re onstage, Silverman’s irksome script feels like less of a liability – the humour of Sawyer’s nickel-and-diming with Lucifer himself becomes obvious.
Sawyer asks questions of her unlikely friend: What is a soul worth, really? And if she agrees to sell hers, she asks, what can she get in return? As the pariah of her small town, she doesn’t want much in terms of money, or even revenge – she wants to do something.
That relationship ultimately balloons into Witch’s beating heart, to the point that the play’s B-plot feels mostly like an afterthought.
Elizabeth is the pariah of her small town.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
While Sawyer and the devil negotiate, and become entangled in surprising, dangerous ways, Witch pivots its gaze to the court of Sir Arthur Banks (Oliver Dennis), where fault lines have emerged between Banks and his heir Cuddy (Thomas Mitchell Barnet). Cuddy needs a wife – which, we’re led to understand, is an unlikely outcome for the jingling Morris dancer – and servant Winnifred (Heeyun Park) has a secret involving Frank (Shawn Ahmed), who hopes to use the Banks family as a means to a better life.
All this is conveyed to us through hyper-contemporary dialogue, such that characters ask each other to “keep things on the DL,” and to speak to one another within “the cone of silence.” The devil, too, at one point, suggests conducting an “avails check” to schedule a soul-selling.
Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster directs Witch’s Toronto premiere with an eye toward the play’s humour, and on opening night, there was plenty of laughter, even if it didn’t often include my own. Lancaster leans into Witch’s ridiculousness – the frictions between Silverman’s ultra-millennial dialogue and the play’s historical content – and there are moments of fleeting brilliance, particularly when Cardinal soliloquizes in the intimate Michael Young Theatre.
The period-appropriate costuming was done by Ting-Huan Christine Urquhart.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
But, owing in large part to its structure, Silverman’s script tends to leave half its cast flailing for meaning. Scenes in Sir Arthur’s court regularly drag, and the conflicts that unfold there feel disappointingly thin. When the storylines finally cross in the play’s last beats, the payoff just isn’t worth the preceding work, despite perfectly serviceable acting from Park, Barnet, Ahmed and Dennis.
Aesthetically, Lancaster’s production emphasizes Witch’s anachronisms, from heavy-metal musical interludes (sound and music are by Olivia Wheeler) to Nick Blais’s sparse, spooky set, which highlights 17th-century class disparities over a giant chasm centre stage. Ting-Huan Christine Urquhart’s costumes, meanwhile, are situated squarely in the distant past – there are no Doc Martens or Converse to be found under Urquhart’s period-appropriate gowns and regalia.
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Ultimately, Witch shares quite a bit in common with Soulpepper’s season opener The Welkin: The plays overlap in their central themes and characters, but they also suffer from a similar lack of a cohesive thesis. Much like The Welkin, there’s not much that Witch tells us about the plight of women – and the allure of a Faustian bargain – that we don’t already know.
And, despite a tremendous final speech from Eddie, as well as truly compelling work from Cardinal throughout, it’s hard not to feel like Witch – both as a script and, in this case, as a production – is a missed opportunity for discourse about the true worth of one’s soul, and what stands to be lost when it’s traded away.