National TheatreReviewLyttelton, London
Twelve bickering, bantering women must determine an accused murderer’s pregnancy claim in this admirable drama
The Welkin is a courtroom drama that sets itself up as a winking feminist twist on Twelve Angry Men. Here, the courtroom is made up of bickering, bantering women who must decide the outcome of a heinous crime in 18th-century Suffolk.
A child has been murdered and an openly unfaithful wife, Sally Poppy, is sentenced to hang on the testimony of her cuckolded husband. She claims to be pregnant, which will earn her a commuted sentence, and the women are enlisted to vote on whether she is telling the truth. Ria Zmitrowicz is the obnoxious, unlikable Sally, and Maxine Peake is the steely and outspoken midwife, Elizabeth, who seems at first her only defender.
Lucy Kirkwood’s previous plays have dealt in large-scale, global themes and The Welkin dazzles with just as much ambition in its examination of the big, immovable structures that inflict violence on women. Her “jury of matrons” forms a sisterhood, of sorts. They bitch, bond and silence the only man in the courtroom. But they are also, unavoidably, the upholders of a misogynistic legal system that disbelieves and condemns a woman on a man’s word; and at times they are a miniature version of the baying mob outside, who want to see Sally swing.
Kirkwood has previously collaborated with Clean Break, a theatre company that works with female prisoners, and this play has a complex engagement with female criminality, from women’s passive complicity to showing them as both victims and perpetrators. Sally is subject to a law that enables a husband with a grudge to incriminate her; the murder victim is an 11-year-old girl; and her mother is a wealthy woman who is able to buy a revenge inflicted on Sally’s body.
The female body is intimately described, though little is actually shown. Jurors speak vividly of menstrual blood and miscarriage, as well as the visceral gore of childbirth. Women’s biology, in this court of law, has a paradoxical power: women’s ovaries render them incapable of reason and judgment, according to a male doctor, yet it is only Sally’s ovaries, and growing womb, that can save her from the hangman’s noose.
Witchcraft emerges as a theme in the second half when a fireplace explodes and a ghostly, elevated body floats above the courtroom, unleashing stories of fearfully wizened midwives and sexually aberrant women. Sally, more and more, appears as the sexually disobedient, flagrantly rebellious outsider scapegoated as the “witch”.
There is so much richness in The Welkin in its visual imagination, too. Bunny Christie’s astounding set has the aesthetics of a 17th-century Dutch painting, along with Lee Curran’s contrasts of light and shade. The jurors initially emerge out of the darkness and are choreographed to strike arresting, painterly tableaux on stage.
But the play’s large-scale ambition undercuts some of its effects: the complex interplay of power between the women on stage leads to protracted conversations and not enough incident. There are a series of plot twists, but they do not build to pressure-cooker tension in James Macdonald’s production. And, while the ensemble cast give incredibly strong performances – notably Haydn Gwynne, Natasha Cottriall and Jenny Galloway – with Peake’s heroic midwife as the most magnificent, the multiple voices, stories and dynamics make it hard to retain a central narrative focus.
Kirkwood has said that she sought to create a “muscular” story out of these provincial women’s lives, so the emotional distancing seems deliberate. It is, above all, a cerebral play that does not require us to walk in these women’s shoes nor empathise with them, but to see their negotiations with power from a clear-eyed vantage point. This makes it arduous and even slightly sterile to watch at times but also profoundly admirable.
At the Lyttelton theatre, London, until 23 May. Broadcast on NT Live on 21 May.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKuklrSme5FpaWlnmpa7cH6SaKuhnV2ssq23yKdkq52mnrK4ecuyq62dnKm8r3nToZyarKKaeq27zZ2mp2WdlsWqusRmp56Zm5p6rcHCsmSkoaKgxLC7ww%3D%3D