Kilkenny Arts Festival review: Spellbinding drama about first woman accused of witchcraft in Ireland

Irish Times

2 days ago

The Alice Project
Multiple Kilkenny city locations
★★★★☆
Climbing the steps of the tiny St Mary's Lane in Kilkenny city, towards one of the performance sites, it strikes one that parts of the small medieval city must be unchanged since the events this story explores.
Indeed the very Kilkenny story of Dame Alice Kyteler, her nemesis in Bishop Richard de Ledrede and her servant Petronella de Meath probably predates many Kilkenny buildings.
Nonetheless the contemporary city provides multiple perfect locations for the first iteration of this two-year, multi-episode project about the first woman in Ireland accused of witchcraft and tried for heresy, and of her 22-year-old servant who was convicted in her stead and burned at the stake in Kilkenny on November 3rd, 1324.
For Episode 2: The Words of Alice, by Emma O'Grady and Medb Lambert, a messenger shiftily leads you around a corner to meet Alice secretly, one-on-one. She's briefing you privately, spinning her side of the story. Glamorous in red, this 'witch' was a wealthy, powerful woman and moneylender in 14th-century Kilkenny. It's just 10 minutes long (played by multiple sets of community casts).
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Paula Drohan is effective in her fast, furious, conspiratorial outrage about the bishop unfairly targeting her. They're obsessed with the four husbands, she marvels disingenuously; all four of Kyteler's husbands died, and her stepchildren accused her of murdering them.
Wrapping up the secretive and intimate meeting, we're joined by two others (here, Dileepa Kasun Jayamanne and Juju Perche). They turn out to be Alice's servant, Petronella, and Sarah, who is the daughter of Petronella and Alice's third husband.
My, but they were complicated relationships, just as interpretations can be momentarily confusing too. This Petronella may be gender-blind casting or a trans person, with the audience expected not to notice the obvious, or are they clumsily trying to add another layer, regarding contemporary perceptions of persecution?
After all, Petronella is actually burnt for heresy, yet Alice escapes. In another episode, possibly unintentionally amusingly, Petronella/Jayamanne asks the bishop: 'Would you be doing this if I was a man?' Also droll is Alice's plea for accurate reporting of her perspective, while notebooks are confiscated.
That afternoon we drop into the Alice Club in Shee Alms House, temporary HQ for the ambitious project. Multiple red Alice costumes line the walls, and cast and crew are in and out and busy. Visitors can chat or share lore about the Alice story.
Asylum Productions have form with large-scale, site-specific work from The Big Chapel X to The Local; co-artistic director and writer Medb Lambert talks about sometimes conflicting variations they hear and about her own sense of ownership of the story.
It clearly suits a 21st-century reading with multiple truths, 'fake news', misogyny, money and maybe murder. The media framework is reflected in the newspaper-style programmes.
Director Dónal Gallagher arrives, reporting how a tour group of Spanish teenagers adjacent to the performance threatened distraction. It's all in the nature of site-specific work in the midst of life on a busy weekday summer morning.
This is not historical re-enactment but playing, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, with a story that has multiple angles.
There are also many hands in the pot creating the two-year Alice, involving several locations and performances, professional and community casts, produced by Asylum and Kilkenny Arts Festival with Once Off Productions and Watergate Theatre, commissioned by Kilkenny County Council. Next year's episodes will culminate with a public outdoor Burning.
Later, for another episode, The Words of Dred by Clare Monnelly, the parade tower in Kilkenny Castle doubles as the prison housing Alice's tormentor, Bishop Richard de Ledrede.
This 25-minute long 'press conference' for an audience of 20 or so presents his side of the tale.
John Doran's bishop is smooth and smarmy in suit, sandals, collarless shirt. He's a mix of slick politician, seedy self-help guru, shifty salesman and preacher. A spoofer and chancer, there's a call to drain the swamp and he's abusive about questions and news outlets he dislikes.
Sarah (this time Indie Cummins) and Petronella arrive with a note from Alice, and we're close enough to read through the paper that it's blunt and three words long. Dred brings out a flip chart with new rules, forbidding copulation with demons. There's a warning: 'Don't be murdering your husbands.'
Alice is amusing and engaging, delightfully centred on the city, its history and locations, enveloping communities and presenting sections as they create them. It leaves the audience wanting more – and that is what's promised next year.