you may have noticed that I write quite a lot about witches...

How did that start?

I graduated from The Open University in 2015 with a First Class Honours degree in History, and wanted to write something which would give our production company Circle of Spears something to perform for a summer season, and which, if possible, would capture a forgotten moment in history and breathe new life into it.

I approached the then managers of the Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle, Cornwall, explained that I was looking for some original documents connected with witchcraft trials, with a view to dramatising them (that was Plan A). They very kindly sent me copies of four handwritten pages of witness depositions from the 1687 case of a Lyme Regis woman who had been accused of bewitching two young people.

The depositions were made by one of the victims, his mother and father, and also by the mother of the other victim - who had died two years previously. The story immediately fascinated me. It wasn't what I'd originally had in mind, but the more I read, and the more detail which sprang out at me - and the more questions I had about this case - the more I realised that this was the story I had to tell. 

There were just two facts about the accused in those depositions: she was married to a mariner, and she smoked a pipe.

To write the play, I researched around the subject, drawing in the lived experiences of a number of women from the British historical record in order to create my character Margery. I didn't want to pull things from my imagination - I wanted everything in the play to reflect something which had happened to a living, breathing person. I wanted every member of every audience to have a "That could be me!" moment.

I chose to set WITCH approximately 100 years prior to the Lyme case, and played fast and loose with the Elizabethan legal system in order to provide my accused, her accuser and the magistrate with a forum outside a court room, a space in which all three of them could talk freely, unencumbered by court process and legal jargon. 

WITCH was originally intended to provide Circle of Spears with a show for one summer season in 2016, but nine years and 80 performances later (and we didn't perform it once Covid hit, so all those performances predate the first lockdown!), it's still here. It's grown into its own entity, and has led me to opportunities in life which I never dreamed of. 

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