A Spooky Story for a Thursday Morning
Our third play is a spooky piece by the American Poet Robert Frost: The Witch of Coös Be warned. If Edgar Allen Poe gives you the creeps, you ‘aint seen nothing yet. Press play below to stream for free.
Once you’ve listened to the play, click below to learn more.
The Players
Stephanie Campion as MOTHER (Agent) (IMDB)
Stephanie comes from the south of England, a country which she Brexited 28 years before it became fashionable, and has recently acquired French nationality to stop them getting at her. For a living she does a couple of things beginning with A : acting and accountancy. Guess which one pays the rent… Surprisingly, teaching finance is a lot like acting: you stand in front of an audience and make it up as you go along. She has done a bit of everything, including voiceovers and a month onstage at the Theatre du Chatelet as Mrs.Eynsford-Hill in “My Fair Lady”, and can be seen on television in “Versailles” (s3 ep 7 – viewable in 126 countries so you have no excuse). She runs a playreading workshop called “Moving Parts” in which actors have lots of fun giving life to authors’ new work and helping the audience tell the author how to rewrite the play.
Keith Crawford as SON
Sound Effects and Editing by Keith Crawford, Little Wonder Jingle by Chris Taylor.
The Production
This was an experiment. First, I wanted to exploit the fact that Stef is a master storyteller with a wonderful voice: I knew I could give her just about anything to read and the audience would be spellbound (admit it, you were). With something as wonderful as the Witch of Coös, which centres on Mother’s voice, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. There are a lot of great monologues out there, and I wanted to see if we could build the right atmosphere. Thankfully we had the right actor.
Secondly, I wanted to test out the add-on two-way mike on my ZOOM H6 to see if it was the same or even better than the four-mike setup I’d been using with Samsung Q2Us (obviously better for more than two voices, but I wanted to compare sound quality). I think you’ll agree it sounds great, which will save time for producing duologues in the future and means I can record plays anywhere I like, just by sticking my Zoom in my man-bag. Is man-bag still a term or did I get left behind a decade ago?
Is it a play or is it a poem?
Frost is most famous for his poetry and when the Witch of Coös was first published, it was in a poetry magazine not as a performance piece. I rather feel as a stage play it wouldn’t be very exciting: the greater part is the monologue by Mother, there is little in the way of stage direction (Mother searching through a bag of buttons for a bone is the last and only action in the play.) Meanwhile Frost, as was his habit, maintains a strict metre throughout, and when discussed it is usually as a famous piece of poetry rather than theatre.
Why record the Witch of Coös as a play?
So why record it as a play and what difference does that make? Well, for a start, he identifies two characters and formats it as a play. Secondly, while it isn’t very visually exciting, it is perfect for radio: the carefully constructed repetition building emotional intensity, the vivid but impossible-to-reproduce-without-expensive-CGI imagery, the glorious build of tension as the skeleton climbs the stairs and the deep sense of mystery the pervades the piece. Finally, and as always, plays are communal efforts and it gave us the artistic licence to move our piece to Yorkshire, because British British British British cup of tea (Coös is actually a county in northern New Hampshire, United States, so our dead Yorkshire lover has a weird taste in songs. Maybe he was an American sailor or something). A Yorkshire accent is basically the shit for ghost stories, and while I, erm, did my usual voice (not an actor), Stef sounds magnificent.
What is the Witch of Coös about?
Well, taken at face value it’s just a spooky ghost story. There’s a clear Edgar Allen Poe type obsession with the dead rising from their graves: a skeleton climbing to the attic with fiery eyes and a husband and wife’s desperate plan to evade the undead. But is that all it is? A scary story? Nope, you guessed it, there’s a much more going on here.
First hints from the bit that’s missing from the play.
As you know, we rely on using either new writer’s material (who maintain their copyright having agreed to write for us), and classics now in the public domain. The public domain version of this script we used had an important difference from the poem as it was published: the poem had a prologue and an epilogue, written in prose. The prologue goes like so:
I STAID the night for shelter at a farm
Behind the mountain, with a mother and son,
Two old-believers. They did all the talking.
At which point we go directly into the mother saving “Some folk believe…” This is an excellent device for stage setting in a poem, but I confess I don’t like it at all for the radio play: instead of the witch talking directly to us (one of the most valuable assets of radio as a medium), the witch is now talking to an unseen narrator and we are listening in. An entirely different emotional experience. Instead we used footsteps and creaky doors to make the listener centre of the piece and skipped the narration. I hate narrators. Another Keith bias. Unless, you know, it’s Richard Burton telling you what people did and didn’t believe in the early years of the 19th century
But there is an epilogue that adds to an important set of hints to what is, perhaps, really going on:
She hadn’t found the finger-bone she wanted
Among the buttons poured out in her lap.
I verified the name next morning: Toffile.
The rural letter-box said Toffile Barre.
So what is really happening?
Nobody but Mother ever sees the skeleton. Son tells the story as if it were true but admits he was only a baby, so how could he know. Even Toffile doesn’t see the skeleton, and besides he’s long dead. So, did it really happen? Is Mother deluding herself, or mistaken, or simply lying?
The one thing for which Toffile reproaches his wife is her habit of falling asleep in the living room while he goes to bed: was theirs’ a sexless marriage (recall they are young enough to have a small child at this point)? We know the skeleton was of her lover, and when he emerges he is all fiery eyes and passion, and yet also uncertainty: if it is a fantasy it is a power fantasy, in which her dead lover emerges and is subsequently locked in the attic. Is this a dream of power over passion? Is that power expressed in its burial in the snow, or is it still there, scratching at the headboard?
There’s a great deal of depth to this piece: a poem you can enjoy for its simple sounds, for its scary story, through the way Frost cleverly builds emotional intensity by the very structure of the sentences, or the hidden depths to this story of power, sexuality and time.
For a bucket load of much cleverer writing about this poem check out: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/witch.htm. It’s also worth googling on google scholar if you’re really interested.
Coming up next: Some Sci-Fi Action Horror!
We had a blast recording this, we hope you enjoy it to. Our next play – a piece of bunker science-fiction written by yours truly – will be out in a couple of weeks. To be informed whenever there’s a new play ready, don’t forget to subscribe below or in the sidebar. And if you know someone else who likes to listen to free radio plays, to be afraid to share or like!
photo credit: Kali_Story <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/44526052@N08/37429694394″>The Witch (2)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
