THE LAST WITCH Comes to the Tron Theatre

Leading Scottish playwright, Rona Munro's powerful and poetic thriller, The Last Witch opens at the Tron Theatre, Tuesday 30th October at 7.45pm.

A long-overdue revival, this is the play's first staging since it was commissioned and performed at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2009. The Last Witch is also the first production in an exciting new collaboration between Pitlochry Festival Theatre and Firebrand Theatre Company.

Directed by multi-award-winning, Richard Baron, it promises to be a vivid and thrilling production. Part meticulous research and partly re-imagined, The Last Witch is set in 1700s Dornoch in the far north of Scotland, around the true story of the woman - known as Janet Horne - last legally executed for witchcraft in Britain.

Into the wildness of the Highlands and amongst grinding poverty bursts colourful, larger-than-life Janet - a vital, playful and passionate widowed woman, full of sexual energy and flexing her ample charm and wit to survive. As Janet says: "Plenty women are withered to dust at my age. Dead in damp graves. But I'm as full of juice as an autumn bramble."

With the arrival of young sheriff, Captain Ross, claims of witchcraft must be investigated... and re-ignited. Janet is standing way out from the crowd in a dangerous time for a woman to be different. Is she practising witchcraft? Or is she simply a free-thinking woman, ahead of her time?

Deirdre Davis, well-known from TV's River City in which she played Eileen Donachie for 13 years brings an electrical charge to the compelling central character of Janet Horne while Rona Munro (James Plays, Iron and Bold Girls) conjures rich, poetic portrayals of contradictory, complex characters into a dark, menacing form, with piercing claws, and a flapping of black wings...

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