'The Trials of Maggie Pollock' revisits history at the Blyth Festival

BY SCOTT STEPHENSON

Beverley Cooper’s latest play, The Trials of Maggie Pollock, debuted at the Blyth Festival last week. The show offers a fictionalized account of the real-life trials and tribulations of a Huron County woman, the titular Maggie Pollock, who was put on trial and convicted of witchcraft in the shockingly recent year of 1919.

 

Caroline Gillis shone as family-matriarch Orillia in Gil Garratt’s Saving Graceland earlier in the Festival season, and continues to do so in the role of Maggie Pollock. Whenever an actor plays two major roles in one season, there is a great potential for parallels to be drawn between the two. Both Orillia and Maggie are burdened by amorphous factors, hovering far outside their control - for Orillia, it was the need of a mother to nurture her child, and her child’s child, even when issues like addiction and abandonment make it feel impossible. For Maggie, she is burdened not by her spirits, in which this play places a firm faith, but by persecution in the form of a broad interpretation of an obscure law.

 

Gillis has handled both of these women beautifully this season.

 

J.D Nicholsen seems to be everywhere at once in this production. There are only five actors in the show, portraying a total of 40 characters - about 30 of those seem to be Nicholsen. He changes hats and voices with a magician-like speed, keeping this historical drama moving at an impressive clip. Amy Keating, Cameron Laurie and Susan Stackhouse as a supporting cast of friends, lovers, ghosts and lawyers also impress with their ability to physically weave together Cooper’s smart, spare epic. Hats off, literally, to Costume Designer Jennifer Triemstra-Johnston and her talented team for bringing this show to life through its wardrobe.

 

Any play about a witch trial is bound to be compared to that most famous of cautionary tales - Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. But The Trials of Maggie Pollock has much more in common with another classic piece of quasi-occult theatre - George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. While The Crucible warns against the societal ‘witch-hunts’ of the McCarthy era in 1950s America, Saint Joan is a more cerebral look at the nature of the letter of our laws, and the way in which we weigh the actions of a woman when she challenges the status quo. Both Joan and Maggie have some seemingly incontrovertible proof of their powers - one can correctly find the true Dauphin in a crowd, and Maggie locates the missing oats. Joan is found guilty of witchcraft by the Inquisitor and the Catholic Church, while Maggie was found guilty by the Ontario Courts system. They are also both believers in the Christian faith - they just approach their love of Jesus in a bit of a different way than locals are used to.

 

In the end, it feels like The Trials of Maggie Pollock isn’t really interested in whether or not any particular woman is a witch - the script makes it clear that we are to take for granted that the tenets of spiritualism are legitimate, at least within the confines of the play. Maggie’s spirits may only appear to her, but, on occasion, they move things about the stage. She also knows things she couldn’t possibly know. So if The Crucible is about the social corrosion caused by paranoia, and Saint Joan is about a clashing of faiths, what reflection of ourselves are we to see in the witch trial at the centre of The Trials of Maggie Pollock? You’ll have to see it yourself to find out.