By Lucy Komisar
The villains of this play were early conspiracy theorists who used techniques that have never gone out of style: viz the U.S. 1920s Red Scare, the 1950s McCarthy time and of course today when people with “wrong” ideas are jailed or deported. It’s where the phrase “witch hunter” comes from. The Red Rose Chain, a nonprofit theater in Ipswich, England, presented a chilling theatrical recollection of this time at 59E59 Theaters.
“The Ungodly,” written and directed by Joanna Carrick, is based on a true story. It is 1645. Across England there are claims of witchcraft. Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Moisy), who labels himself the Witch-Finder General, promotes the mass hysteria and superstition that targeted and murdered women because they were independent. The early killer misogyny.
He writes “The Discovery of Witches” about his methods. It was published in New England and is believed responsible for the deaths of 300 women accused of witchcraft in Connecticut between 1644 and 1646. It was later used at the Salem Witch Trials.
The play opens in the village of Mistley in East Anglia, in the southeast of England. The simple set shows Tudor beams. Richard (Christopher Ashman) is besotted with Susan (Nadia Jackson), mature enough at age 30. Finally, she consents, and they have sex before the wedding.
Beyond that, which I found interesting, Matthew was a lawyer of little note. He decides, like self-promoters of more recent times, such as McCarthy, “I’ll be a witch finder.”
Several babies die, a cow falls, a horse rears and throws Richard. He says he heard voices, women calling, mumbling. Matthew calls them witches.
The Edwards baby dies. Propagandized by Matthew (the word is well chosen), Richard and Susan give evidence in the trial of several women accusing them of bringing about the child’s death.
The net is spread. A young woman, Rebecca (Rei Mordue), 18, is tight faced: “I’m not a witch.” Her mother was accused in another town and acquitted. But Matthew is now screaming, insisting she tell who was at a meeting, “naming names.”
One had complained about a landowner: “You own everything and the previous owner gave alms for the poor.”
Matthew accuses her, “You attended a meeting where the forces of darkness were called upon to harm your neighbors.” (Oligarchs against workers?) He deprives her of sleep and food and gets the impressionable girl to repeat what he tells her, that she has an “imp,” that the kitten she held was the devil. Gets her to declare that she has slept with the devil in the shape of a man.
Richard hallucinates that a hare chased his dog. Becky admits to Richard that she spoiled his brewing beer and sent imps to kill his son.
They hang the mother, not the girl. Richard wonders, “Was it right, no other path? Were we right to kill them?” He has doubts. But he doesn’t act on them.
The cast is superb, Jackson and Ashman as the naive then corrupted couple, Moisy as the personification of neurotic evil, and Mordue as an innocent unable to challenge her vile accuser. Joanna Carrick directs her play with a sharpness that makes 500 years ago seem like today.
Does this have relevance today? Can we transpose it to the “ungodly” people who protest the Israeli genocide in Gaza? Will playwrights in years or centuries hence wonder if it was right to murder hundreds of thousands of Palestinians targeted by the self-proclaimed Israeli Witch-Finder, Netanyahu? It is why it is important to remind publics of the gruesome antecedents of such killers.
“The Ungodly.” Written and directed by Joanna Carrick. 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, NYC. Runtime 2hrs5min. Opened April 24, 2025, closed May 11, 2025.