Junior Production - The Witches

Ian Mitchell, Head of Psychology writes: In Roald Dahl’s novel, The Witches, the unnamed, eight year old narrator explains to his readership, ‘only a woman can be a witch’. True though this might be in Dahl’s fictional world, in the theatrical sense the MTS junior play demonstrated that males can in fact be witches and terrifying ones at that.The play version is largely faithful to Dahl’s original tale, in which a boy endures two encounters with witches to orchestrate a revenge attack equally as sophisticated.

In the junior play the boy’s cigar-smoking grandmother was brilliantly adapted and portrayed by Ishmael Levy’s sartorial grandfather whose opening bed-time, spook story set the scene for a dark and sinister production. When Teigue Murphy’s narrator unwittingly chooses a hotel conference room for mouse-training he finds himself trapped in the annual meeting of the fearsome English witches, chaired by Joe Rich’s Grand High Witch, who is suitably spine-chilling and charismatic as Dahl’s devious, child-frying psychopath. Their agenda is simple: the destruction of all children by spiking sweets with an animorphic potion. During the witches’ conference, the revelation of child protection operatives into fully fledged kindergarten killers was one of the brilliant scenes of the play and owed much to some exceptional technical acting, painstaking make-up and costume detail, and Mr Garnett’s eccentric appropriation of Peter Greenaway soundtracks and carmine set designs. As the witches’ brutal plan goes chins up, the ensembled cast flourished in a stunning display of muricidal mayhem. In fine form also, Harrison Rob and Tom Szostak offered great value as the neurotic, middle class parents to Harry Brookes’ wonderfully acted, binge-eating sadist, Bruno. As Murphy is assigned with the challenge of feeding the witches their own medicine he does so scurrying around the highly entertaining Adam Haffar as the head French chef. Superb supporting performances and split-timing special effects helped to round off four jaw-dropping performances which did ample justice to Dahl’s dogs-dropping shenanigans. A fantastic show all round!

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