THE LAST WITCH DRAMATURGY

Rona Munro

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Biography

Rona Munro grew up in Aberdeen, Scotland and now lives on the Scottish borders. Along with The Last Witch, she has written other plays such as The James Plays, Iron, Bold Girls, The Maiden Stone, Scuttlers, Long Time Dead, and Pandas. She wrote The Last Witch for the Traverse Theatre and Edinburgh International Festival in 2009.

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Excerpts from Interviews and Research

On the 3 types of witches: "You've got women going to the stake protesting their innocence; you've got others who say they are witches because they are tortured; and a third group who say, 'Yes, I am a witch.' I thought that was quite interesting. I think I was also looking at what happens when you are a big personality in a small place. If she'd been in another time, Janet would have started the local amdram society, or she would have been the person on the local council who ran everything."

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On sleep torture: "You weren't allowed to torture accused witches in Scotland. You could deprive them of sleep, but that was about all. And that was about giving them time to contemplate their sins so that they could make a confession. You can see parallels with Guantanamo where they bent that law to the point of leaving people pleading for mercy. The confessions when they came, said so much about the poverty of those communities. It was things like, 'The Devil gave me a big cake, and I said okay I'm yours.'"

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On The Crucible: "I wanted to do something different. What The Crucible does very effectively is give you a sense of a whole community gripped by hysteria. I thought: wouldn't it be interesting if it was just one powerful individual in the community challenging another and it became a struggle between the two? In small rural communities you can often get that kind of scenario."