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This enjoyably feral offering from all-female, historian-led theatre company Dirty Hare is a very unconventional dramatisation of a very specific historical incident: the strange, lurid tale of Anne Gunter.
In 1604, during the early reign of the occult-obsessed James I, Alice’s dad Brian Gunter – the richest man in his Oxfordshire village – killed the two sons of local woman Elizabeth Gregory, understandably igniting a feud between the families. Later, Anne grew sick – or (it’s implied here) she just had heavy periods that Brian seized upon as evidence of witchcraft on behalf of Elizabeth, who was (understandably tbf) poisoning the community against him. What is indisputable is that he turned to the courts in an effort to get Elizabeth prosecuted for witchcraft, something he pursued so aggressively that it ended up being put before the king himself. Hence, there remains a lot of documentary evidence for the case, despite its extreme age.
There probably is a conventional historical drama in all this, but that’s definitely not what Dirty Hare have crafted, something you can probably surmise from the company makeup. ‘Gunter’ is devised by the core Dirty Hare team of director Rachel Lemon, actor Julia Grogan (she plays Elizabeth) and Lydia Higman who is – gloriously! – a historian and multi-instrumentalist.
Supplemented by two further actors – Hannah Jarrett-Scott and Norah Lopez Holden play Brian and Anne – ‘Gunter’ is essentially a wild piece of gig theatre. It’s full of gags and silly audience interaction. But it”s deeply trippy, unbound by conventional structure and underpinned by constant musical interludes that span a variety of genres but I guess favour spindly post-punk, with Higman lead musician but the entire company singing and occasionally manning instruments.
After a dryly funny introduction from Higman, the actual storytelling is very impressionistic, the narrative only emerging in brief flashes, all couched in modern language. Formal weirdness is half the point: it’s fun to have stuff like the cast coming on wearing animal heads in a section explaining witches’ familiars (apparently Elizabeth’s was a bear – not sure how that would have worked).
But Dirty Hare do also successfully paint a picture of Brian Gunter as a conceited, self regarding man who literally killed Elizabeth’s kids and still had such monstrous entitlement that he hounded her through the courts. And Anne is made out to be a fascinatingly eccentric, in many ways abused young woman who possibly played along with her dad for fun but finally loses it with her monstrous father.
It’s a bit rough in patches. Some sequences are so abstract as to be bewildering: I had almost no idea what was happening in the trial scenes, and while that might be just how Dirty Hare like it, I did feel a lot more invested during the sequences where I did understand what was going on. Still, I really enjoyed it, and I don’t think the answer is to rework ‘Gunter’ into tameness, but to allow it to roam free and for the company to move on to devising the next entry in their singular oeuvre. A gleeful slap in the face of a show – history served up messily, with the bits still twitching.