Review: The Welkin, The Weston Studio, Bristol Old Vic – ‘The entire cast is fantastic’

The year is 1759, and in a rural Suffolk village Sally Poppy is set to pay the ultimate price for a murder of a child in her care, based on the testimony of her cuckold husband.

After she claims to be pregnant at the 11th hour, a panel of 12 women are appointed to determine whether this is true, as Sally’s life, and the life of her alleged unborn child hang in the balance.

‘The welkin’ is an old term for the sky, or the vault of heaven, and writer Lucy Kirkwood has set her play against the backdrop of the arrival of Halley’s Comet which appears every 75 or so years. The life expectancy of a woman in England in the 18th century was roughly 40 years.

A woman accused of a capital offence in the 18th century could not be hanged if she was pregnant, so these 12 women are taken away from the drudgery of their daily lives and given a much more exciting purpose.

Drawing comparisons between 12 Angry Men and The Crucible, Kirkwood has created something much more complex than a story of right and wrong, or guilt and innocence.

We get to know all the women, and their complex stories, which solicit moments of sadness, violence, but also direct humour and levity.

Lotte Pearl plays the condemned Sally with a rebellious yet mischievous and determined intensity in the face of the accusations against her, which in the 18th century would have been interpreted as either madness, or the touch of the devil. The same could be said for now, and Kirkwood never lets the audience turn a blind eye to the comparisons with modern day society’s attitude to women.

The women are led by midwife Lizzy Luke, wonderfully played by Ellie Spooner, who agrees to join the jury when she hears that it’s likely the vote will not go in Sally’s favour. She forms the moral centre of the play, and recognises a chance for sisterhood to overthrow male authority as more important than whether Sally is pregnant or not.

She implores the women who have voted against Sally to change their opinion: “Because every card dealt to her today and for many years before has been an unkind one, because she has been sentenced by men pretending to be certain of things of which they are entirely ignorant, and now we sit here imitating them, trying to make an un-governable thing governable, I do not ask you to like her.

“I ask you to hope for her, so that she might know she is worth hoping for. And if you cannot do that for her sake, think instead of the women who will be in this room when that comet comes round again, and how brittle they will think our spirits, how ashamed they will be, that we were given our own dominion and we made it look exactly like the one down there.”

The entire cast is fantastic, and all hold the audience’s attention with full command of their characters, however, the play itself could be shorter. As the interval rolls around it’s hard to understand why the play needs another hour, after making most of its main points in the first, incredibly tight, half. The second half changes its style slightly, and despite still being entertaining, it feels slightly at odds with the rest of the play.

Instead of ending on a hopeful note for the future of women in society, Kirkwood does what many are afraid to do, and suggests that things have not moved forward enough for women over the last 300 years, and that they won’t in the next 300 either.

Bristol Old Vic Theatre School presents The Welkin at The Weston Studio, Bristol Old Vic from November 9-16 at 8pm, with additional 3pm matinee shows on Thursday and Saturday. Tickets are available at www.bristololdvic.org.uk.

All photos: Craig Fuller

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