Although The Witch does not have a recorded professional stage history, the scenes it shares with Macbeth have been professionally produced. For a long time after the Restoration productions of Macbeth, in particular those based around Davenant’s adaptation, took their cue from the scenes shared with The Witch and produced witches with an emphasis on singing, dancing and sometimes comedy. With a return to high seriousness in productions of Macbeth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hecate and her cohorts tended to be banished from the stage. Two particularly notable exceptions to this tendency are Frank Dunlop’s production at the Young Vic in 1975 and Peter Hall and John Russell Brown’s production at the National Theatre in 1978. Dunlop’s production made Macbeth into the witches’ play, many felt at the expense of Macbeth’s tragic status as he became the witches’ puppet. Hecate and her coven opened and closed the play ‘invoking the dark gods up and down the Young Vic aisles’ (Michael Billington in The Guardian, 16 January 1975). The National Theatre production was more restrained in its use of the witches, but some critics disapproved of its beautiful young Hecate (clearly not Middleton’s witch). In general, critical response to the inclusion of the Hecate material in both these productions was disapproving and suggested that the critics concerned had very set and conservative conceptions of the effect that the witches are supposed to achieve in Macbeth.

The witch scenes in The Witch, judging from the University of Melbourne production, constitute one of the strongest aspects of the play. They are entertaining and visually impressive, and there is a powerful dramatic tension produced by the juxtaposition of the wild, fantastic and funny witch scenes with the moody, troubled and murderous court scenes. The witch scenes tend to upstage the court scenes and mock them; they also contrast in pace with most of the court scenes, which are packed with narrative. In addition a broadly comic reading of the witches’ scenes helps highlight the comic element present in the gruesome horror in some of the court scenes.

One of the most crucial production questions raised by The Witch (and also by Macbeth) is how the witches are to be represented on-stage. In The Witch (I.ii.119–20) Sebastian seems to suggest that Hecate’s appearance is fearful and horrific, and she is called ‘hag’ (11. 178, 198) and ‘foul’ (III.iii.17). Similarly Macbeth’s witches are described in terms that suggest the haggish: they have beards; they are ‘withered’ and ‘wild’ in their attire; they have skinny lips and choppy fingers (Macbeth I.iii.40, 44–6). Jonson’s description of the witches from Masque of Queens suggests a more emblematically evil appearance, but there is a dignity to these descriptions that is a long way from Hecate and Firestone’s double act and even knockabout humour (e.g. the end of I.ii). Firestone is present in the witch scenes primarily to point the audience in the direction of the comic.