Welcome to my website!
2016 was a very exciting year for me. I graduated from The Open University in 2015 with an Honours degree in History, which had taken seven years of hard slog to achieve. Having finally achieved it, I wanted to do something practical with it. I have always been deeply interested in social history and in any project which sought to preserve traditions, folklore and the experiences of not only those who lived centuries ago, but also those who lived a few decades ago. For example, I love photographs which capture everyday life in Victorian and Edwardian times, but I also love photos from the fifties and sixties. Basically, anything which gives us a little insight into how people used to live, what they believed in and how they made sense of the world around them.
I spent a while trying to think of a way that I could use my degree. A germ of an idea came to me randomly one day in late 2015 and I played with it for a while, trying to form it into a coherent shape. From that idea, WITCH emerged in April 2016.
Building on the desire to preserve a piece of the past and perhaps make it more accessible or help it to reach a wider audience, I decided to see if it would be possible to dramatise witch trial transcripts. I wanted to use my love of acting in tandem with my degree. I approached the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, UK, who were immediately very enthusiastic about my idea and gave me a copy of the paperwork in the case of Deanes Gimmerton.
Gimmerton was a housewife from Lyme Regis in Dorset, UK, who was accused of witchcraft and tried in 1687. Hers is the most complete written record of an English witch trial.
The information in the Gimmerton papers was utterly compelling, but as soon as I started reading it, I knew that it wouldn't translate well to the stage. I didn't want to find myself writing yet another courtroom drama about witch trials. There are plenty of those already. Yet the evidence in the Gimmerton case was fascinating and I considered a few ideas until I came up with a way to tick all my boxes. From the experiences of Deanes Gimmerton and her 'victims', the Scorch family, came my three fictitious characters: Margery Scrope, the accused; Thomas Latimer, her accuser; and Sir William Tyrell, the local magistrate who questions them both in order to determine whether Scrope should be sent for trial.
WITCH, performed by Circle of Spears Productions, the only company with permission to do so, premiered at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in July 2016 and received high praise from its audiences throughout the summer season that year. At the time of writing, we have taken the show into a school in Cornwall and performed for 200 12-13 year-olds. We've performed to university students and have had enquiries from other universities, as well as being booked for several private performances. We enjoyed two fully booked performances in Exeter in November 2016. The show is going to tour in 2017 - during the summer, we collected a long list of venue suggestions from audience members and are currently working our way through them for viability. Information about Circle of Spears can be found here.
Tracey Norman, Devon, January 2017
2016 was a very exciting year for me. I graduated from The Open University in 2015 with an Honours degree in History, which had taken seven years of hard slog to achieve. Having finally achieved it, I wanted to do something practical with it. I have always been deeply interested in social history and in any project which sought to preserve traditions, folklore and the experiences of not only those who lived centuries ago, but also those who lived a few decades ago. For example, I love photographs which capture everyday life in Victorian and Edwardian times, but I also love photos from the fifties and sixties. Basically, anything which gives us a little insight into how people used to live, what they believed in and how they made sense of the world around them.
I spent a while trying to think of a way that I could use my degree. A germ of an idea came to me randomly one day in late 2015 and I played with it for a while, trying to form it into a coherent shape. From that idea, WITCH emerged in April 2016.
Building on the desire to preserve a piece of the past and perhaps make it more accessible or help it to reach a wider audience, I decided to see if it would be possible to dramatise witch trial transcripts. I wanted to use my love of acting in tandem with my degree. I approached the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, UK, who were immediately very enthusiastic about my idea and gave me a copy of the paperwork in the case of Deanes Gimmerton.
Gimmerton was a housewife from Lyme Regis in Dorset, UK, who was accused of witchcraft and tried in 1687. Hers is the most complete written record of an English witch trial.
The information in the Gimmerton papers was utterly compelling, but as soon as I started reading it, I knew that it wouldn't translate well to the stage. I didn't want to find myself writing yet another courtroom drama about witch trials. There are plenty of those already. Yet the evidence in the Gimmerton case was fascinating and I considered a few ideas until I came up with a way to tick all my boxes. From the experiences of Deanes Gimmerton and her 'victims', the Scorch family, came my three fictitious characters: Margery Scrope, the accused; Thomas Latimer, her accuser; and Sir William Tyrell, the local magistrate who questions them both in order to determine whether Scrope should be sent for trial.
WITCH, performed by Circle of Spears Productions, the only company with permission to do so, premiered at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in July 2016 and received high praise from its audiences throughout the summer season that year. At the time of writing, we have taken the show into a school in Cornwall and performed for 200 12-13 year-olds. We've performed to university students and have had enquiries from other universities, as well as being booked for several private performances. We enjoyed two fully booked performances in Exeter in November 2016. The show is going to tour in 2017 - during the summer, we collected a long list of venue suggestions from audience members and are currently working our way through them for viability. Information about Circle of Spears can be found here.
Tracey Norman, Devon, January 2017
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