REVIEW: In Síofra at the Red Sandcastle, fairy lore curdles into communal dread

Who should you pay heed to? What should you believe? 

Some will tell you never to build a house on Knockma Hill. It is fairy land, after all, and its hidden residents are known to take offence. But Michael does not listen. He never has. Even as a child, when his mother repeated the old warnings, he seemed more fascinated than frightened. Now, at 23, he’s outgrown such nonsense altogether. But rest assured: dread will find its way back to him.

Spindle Collective’s unnerving Síofra takes us to 19th-century Ireland, where folklore gives a watchful community a language for the uncanny. At night, you’ll find the residents of Belclare gathering to drink and trade ghastly fairy lore. From wide-eyed Dr. Ferris (Eric Woolfe) to the village gossips, everyone seems well practised in superstition. Scowling Niamh (Jeanie Calleja) warns them not to play with fire: these are not parlour games, but premonitions.

It’s 1867, and newlyweds Michael and Mary are starting to build a life together: a new house, a child, and the promise of a future. But when Michael (Darius Rathe) joins a rebellion and leaves home, the story curdles into stranger terrain. By the time he returns, something is off. Mary appears altered. Natalia Bushnik portrays her as hollow-eyed and rigid, her body caught in a state of twitchy over-vigilance. Grandfather Jim (Brian Taylor) hints at macabre occurrences in the house during Michael’s absence. But why should he be trusted? He’s an old man losing his hold on the world, mewling almost constantly.

The skin-crawling force of the script lies in the ambiguity of its storytelling. Playwrights Kathleen Welch and Bushnik refuse a single account, making the community’s gaze the play’s unstable narrator. Speaking from an undefined future, villagers look back on the couple’s story, trading competing perspectives. The question, then, becomes whom to listen to. 

Ask Siobhan (Rachel Offer), and she’ll tell you her sister Mary is simply suffering through postpartum trauma. Ask Siobhan’s husband, Thomas (Justin Otto), and he’ll insist Mary has been taken by the fairies. Ask the village gossip Eimear (Claire Haig-Halsall), and she’ll insinuate that Mary isn’t the virtuous girl people believe. Beneath the rough grain of rural Irish cadences, hearsay accumulates, suspense gathers, and certainty slips away.

If the production finds its rhythm in the slow creep of insinuation, Welch’s staging gives that language an antsy physical life. In nimble passages, the actors skitter through the Red Sandcastle Theatre’s packed room, entering from all sides, sometimes even from behind us. The effect is haunting: I, for one, felt shivery, encircled by presences scuttling through the dark.

That unease carries into the scene transitions. Singing a cappella or occasionally accompanied by guitar, the ensemble performs Welch’s folk-inflected songs with a mournful charge. Their lyrics keep fate hanging over the room, longing for resolution — for the comfort of a happy-ever-after in which “my lover’s here to stay” — while the baleful atmosphere already warns that this promise will go unfulfilled. So goes the grim verdict of this cautionary tale.

Ciarán Connaire’s set extends the sense of foreboding. Dry twigs dangle above the actors, twisted and branching like a sinister omen of the punishment Michael’s hubris may have invited. The result leaves the audience on edge, searching for coherence inside a dark fable that refuses to settle into sense. We feel something close to Michael’s own exasperation as the world around him closes in.

On opening night, that confusion seemed to live in Rathe’s body. His Michael was drenched in sweat, haunted-eyed, and his mouth half-open as though possessed. Some of that, I’ll admit, was the heat’s doing. The Red Sandcastle’s close-quarters, 45-seat interior was sweltering, and actors and spectators alike showed the strain. But the discomfort hardly broke the spell. Welch and Bushnik have built such a taut script, and the cast delivers it with such disquieting intensity, that I was too busy piecing together what really happened in Belclare in 1867 to care. And if someone has to faint along the way, so be it.

In the end, no one fainted. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the discomfort became part of the night’s allure, but the production’s grip held. Perhaps that is because this show arrives at a moment when Toronto stages seem newly receptive to horror, from the demand around Mirvish’s current run of Paranormal Activity to the city’s first horror theatre festival in January. Síofra is also the second entry in the Spindle Collective’s folklore trilogy, following Samca, rooted in Romanian myth, and preceding spilleHOLLE, which turns to Germany. Together, the three works trace a pan-European map of gothic superstition, returning fear to its old interpretive force. We may like to think a world governed by scientific rigour has moved beyond such superstition. And yet the uncanny persists.

Síofra runs at the Red Sandcastle Theatre until June 28. More information is available here.

Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Alessandro Stracuzzi is a Toronto-based theatre critic and performance researcher from Italy. He holds an MA in Performance Studies from the University of Milan, and writes about contemporary theatre, performance, and experimental practices. His criticism has appeared in Stage Door, Our Theatre Voice, Stratagemmi, and Fermata Spettacolo.

LEARN MORE