Review: CALL ME FURY, VAULT Festival

After winning People's Choice Award in last year's edition of the VAULT Festival, Out Of The Forest Theatre are back with Call Me Fury to tell the stories of unjustly condemned women throughout the centuries.

Folk songs and an evocative script are used to picture witch trials from all over the world: from Salem to the Colonies, from Africa to Northern Europe, men have been unjustifyingly silencing women. Call Me Fury sets out to make their crowds aware of those crimes, depicting ignorance and suspicion that can be easily tied to the modern day too.

Written by Sasha Wilson - who also performs alongside Andrea Black, Mairi Hawthorn, and Silvana Maimone - it's linguistically compelling, with instances that near prose poetry. The sharp lighting design (Will Alder) and lingering smoke combined with the natural atmosphere of The Vaults help create a primal, telling-stories-around-a-campfire vibe, with the actresses embodying male authority and innocents alike.

After a slightly hiccuping beginning where it's assumed that the audience is already in on the contents of the play and its background, the piece grows into its true form and shows the potential to be a gargantuan show. Asia Osborne's dynamic direction leads the narrative clearly, even though the characters seem not to be fully formed yet.

"Fear becomes a disease" they say, and it's perhaps too easy to draw a parallel between the witch trials and today's political uneasiness. The company manages to make a statement about today with a true-to-life cautionary tale.

Call Me Fury runs at VAULT Festival until 17 February.