Dirty Hare bewitches its audience with their enchanting theatrical magic
Gunter tells a true story of historically archived witch trial case, kicked off by Brian Gunter killing two young lads during a football match. Their mother, Elizabeth Gregory, vows for justice but Gunter is the wealthiest man in the village. What’s left for her is sheer humiliation. When his daughter, Anne Gunter falls ill, he exploits Anne to frame Gregory (and two other women in town) as witches, by forcing Anne to play nasty tricks showing her as bewitched. Such deception is eventually revealed by a renowned Oxford academic, and the three women are found not guilty. Now the table turns on Brian and Anne Gunter. Nevertheless, the result of the Gunters’ trial, together with the rest of Anne Gunter’s life, is lost because of the gunpowder plot in 1606.
The creative team of Dirty Hare, comprised of Lydia Higman, Julia Grogan, and Rachel Lemon, masterfully presents their capability of crafting a non-fictional theatre about historical archives. By mixing up the historian (Lydia Higman) acting as the narrator and a cast of three (Julia Grogan, Hannah Jarrett-Scott, and Norah Lopez Holden) performing around twenty characters including neighbours and juries, this production offers a plethora of delightful surprises to the audiences that I almost feel spoiled.
A standout feature is the use of music. Sometimes you hear Hamilton-style rap (the “bad woman” song), showcasing the cast’s extraordinary vocal capacity; the other times you may enjoy its folk tone adding more fidelity to a historical England. Folk songs, as the genre of storytelling, transforms the cast into bards (or bardesses, I guess). Besides Higman as the all-time musician adeptly handling over three instruments, the cast also occasionally play the instruments, such as a “musical washingboard” for percussion effect, or a trumpet that adds to a piercing and distant melancholy to the ambience.
The production strikes a delicate balance between the English theatre traditions and contemporary European theatres. There’s a joke about the coconut in Elizabethan theatre at the beginning, when the historian advises us to use our imagination on a bare stage. It finds a poignant echo at the end when the historian tells us what happens to Anne. After the trial, she travels down the Thames that afternoon, possibly “with wind in her hair and a fag in her hand”. This vivid image, conjured solely by verdict, instils a sense of hope seeded through the fertile ground of imagination. Yet under the design of Anna Orton, the stage is scarcely “bare”, coming with three movable footlights for multiple uses and several buckets for audience interaction, in line with a retractable scrim effectively showcasing Brechtian alienation when it is raised up, unveiling the whole “backstage”.
The final scene is nothing but spellbinding. As the result is forever lost, Anne, performed with fervent intensity by Holden, ferociously confronts the historian with haunting questions: Did she die? did he die? DO I DIE? These questions somehow feel like a reversal of fourth-wall breaking: as this whole production is openly presentational, such questions reveal how representation can be utterly powerful in certain moments. “Anne” frantically taps the footlight that is now out of the control; then the microphone, a guarantee of voice spoken out and voice being heard. But this time it no longer works. No one hears her.
Finally, “Anne” smashes sands against the “unbiased” scrim, which stands as cold archival records. Witnessing a number of productions messing the stage with whatever material (water, paint, confetti, pieces of bricks, chocolate-made poo, etc), it is the very first time I do not view it as sheer formalism. Instead, it is imbued with row and fierce emotions that I feel so convincing and dear. Then she cuts the wire of the scrim that now only displays “no signal”- for the scrim, for Anne, and for the stories of countless women killed as witches, and those deemed as bewitched victims.
What is recorded as fact, is not true. The theme song, “Oh Where the Bad Man Sleeps” questions why in historical narrative, men always hide: in archives, in their tax records, in their familial graves. Bad men are nowhere to be found when you accuse them for persecution and intimidation; bad men are found everywhere, trying to determine the story of women and the way of telling and writing it, just like how Brian manipulates Anne, and how the jury and the court eventually lost interest in her. There is not witch in real life, but Gunter demonstrates how women have been actually “bewitched” and ensnared by men through a real witch trial story in history.