Cast members of The Welkin include (from left to right) Fiona Highet, Nadine Bhaba, Raquel Duffy, Hallie Seline, Olunike Adeliyi, Ghazal Azarbad, Natasha Mumba, Mayko Nguyen, and Brefny Caribou.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
Title: The Welkin
Written by: Lucy Kirkwood
Performed by: Mayko Nguyen, Bahia Watson, Brefny Caribou, Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, Raquel Duffy, Kyra Harper, Cameron Laurie, Craig Lauzon, Annie Luján, Natasha Mumba, Hallie Seline, Addison Wagman
Directed by: Weyni Mengesha
Company: Soulpepper Theatre, Crow’s Theatre and the Howland Company
Venue: Soulpepper Theatre
City: Toronto
Year: Runs to Oct. 5
There’s a moment in the second act of The Welkin when time stands still. For an instant, the play buzzes with possibility; it stops feeling like a feminist inversion of Twelve Angry Men or The Crucible and metastasizes into something more complicated, a collision between past and present set to unlikely, anachronistic music.
We’re in a makeshift courtroom, an attic hideaway somewhere in rural England. It’s 1759, and Sally (the ever-captivating Bahia Watson), a young woman who may or may not be pregnant, has been found guilty of murdering a child.
Whether or not she committed the crime is sort of beside the point – The Welkin takes place under the dappled glow of Halley’s comet, in an era not exactly known for its grace toward women accused of treachery. What matters now is whether Sally is actually pregnant, and, indeed, if she can persuade a jury of her peers to agree on the issue. If so, she’ll be shipped off to America; if not, she’ll be hanged.
Bahia Watson plays Sally in The Welkin.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
British playwright Lucy Kirkwood makes the astute (if at times heavy-handed) point that the pillars that prop up modern society – the legal, medical and religious systems that distinguish good from bad – seldom allow room for ambiguity or grey areas. A woman is lying, or she’s telling the truth; she’s with child, or she isn’t; she’s a pariah, or she’s a martyr.
Of course, real life doesn’t work that way – rarely is the schism between fact and fiction so neatly drawn.
In The Welkin, nothing is as it seems at first glance. Over time, Kirkwood smudges her initial premise to the point of abstraction, layering images overtop each other such that the play feels like a painting, pointillistic and blurry as Sally’s alleged crimes disappear between the brushstrokes.
Director Weyni Mengesha offers a visually rich production that echoes Kirkwood’s arty prose. Bonnie Beecher’s exquisite lighting, Julie Fox’s set and Michelle Tracey’s costumes capture the despair of child loss, the stink of class disparity. When the jurors tasked with deciding Sally’s fate – particularly midwife Lizzy (an extraordinary Mayko Nguyen) – begin to sense the futility of their work, the surrounding physical world punishes them for it. A fireplace explodes in a fury of ash; a window cracks along fault lines a hundred centuries old.
Mengesha’s enormous ensemble cast – 18 people in total – breathes sophistication and depth into a script that at times focuses on Big Ideas™ at the expense of a cogent story. Neither Nguyen nor Watson telegraph the play’s (too many) twists, and both enjoy meaty dialogue that sees them flex their emotional range without succumbing to melodrama. Craig Lauzon offers a similarly understated take on Mr. Coombes, the man forced to monitor the women as they bicker their way to a verdict; Raquel Duffy, too, is a standout as the silent Sarah Hollis.
The play features meaty dialogue and a large ensemble cast, with 18 people in total.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
After the first act of The Welkin, I was reasonably confident in my assessment of the piece as a well-paced, if somewhat earnest retort to a genre of courtroom plays that has historically ignored women. One early sequence, a rhythmic cacophony of domestic labour, took my breath away.
But the second act, both in the play and in this production, ties Kirkwood’s initial premise into stubborn knots: The play’s ghostly motifs of contemporary women feel both overdue and superfluous by the time they flicker onto the stage alongside Sally and her executioners. Kirkwood’s bold use of a certain Kate Bush song, not dissimilar to Kimberly Belflower’s use of Lorde’s Green Light in John Proctor Is the Villain, only further thickens the stew: Whether or not that choice works is ultimately up to you.
All things considered, The Welkin is a piece of theatre that’s impressive in scale, but somehow dissatisfying, like a single bite of a cookie whose remaining pieces sit just out of reach. Kirkwood’s text never quite coalesces into a decisive argument about women and their place in the world, despite the near-uniform excellence of the women bringing The Welkin to life both on and offstage.
A provocative, engaging season opener, with an accomplished ensemble cast to boot? Absolutely. But like Halley’s comet in the 18th century, The Welkin might leave you looking up, mouth agape, with more questions than answers about the state of the world.
