Witch - The Play

Witch sends a devil into a village to buy souls, which is straightforward work until he reaches the woman everybody has already decided is a witch. She listens to the offer, asks what exactly he imagines she still has to trade, and turns him down. The play is the argument that follows.

Elizabeth Sawyer has been blamed for everything that has gone wrong nearby for years. She has no particular reason to want the world to continue and no interest at all in being rescued from it. Meanwhile the devil works his way through the local manor, where an heir, an adopted son and a servant each want something badly enough to sell for it. His difficulty is that the one person with nothing left to lose will not bargain.

Jen Silverman wrote it, taking the bones from a Jacobean play about a real woman executed for witchcraft and rebuilding it as a contemporary comedy of despair. It premiered in 2018 and has been produced steadily since by theatres after something funny and bleak that refuses to resolve neatly.

The dialogue is deliberately modern against a period setting, which strips out the distance: these are people talking exactly as people talk now about ambition, resentment and what they would trade for a better position. The comedy is dry, and the despair underneath it is never played for sympathy.

It is for audiences who like a fable with the moral removed, and who enjoy watching an argument between two people who are both, in different ways, entirely right. Live, the stillness is what does the work.