A new play from site-specific theatre company Twenty Seven Live will tell the story of the largest mass execution for witchcraft in English history, which took place in Newcastle.
On 21 August 1650, fourteen women and one man—condemned as “the children of Satan”—were hanged on the city's Town Moor. This new play, WYTCH, will tell their story and will be performed in the Great Hall of the Castle Keep in Newcastle, under which, in the seventeenth century, was the gaol for the country of Northumberland where some of the accused were kept until their trial and execution.
“Newcastle had suffered a turbulent decade with plague and being besieged by the Scots in 1644,” explained David Silk, Learning Officer at Newcastle Castle. “This all culminated in a craze for witch-finding in 1649 and 1650.
"We are very excited to have Twenty Seven Live bring to life the grisly past of our town, one of the darkest chapters in the Castle’s history.”
The witches’ remains were dug up in the graveyard of St Andrews Church on Newgate Street in 2008, reminding the people of Newcastle of these women and their unnerving deaths almost four hundred years ago.
The play is written by Newcastle playwright Lee Mattinson (Chalet Lines, Donna Disco).
“WYTCH has been unlike any other project I've worked on,” he says. “I'm usually faced with a blank page on which I can write whatever my heart desires. But with it came the responsibility to dramatise the very real executions of very real people with little more than a list of names to hand. It explores a climate of paralysing paranoia that lay hidden in the city's history.”
WYTCH runs from 14 until 31 October at 7:30PM (with no shows on the 16, 20, 22, 29 and 30). Tickets (£15, £12.50 concessions) can be bought from Ticketsource.