There are problems in staging witches as hags in the late twentieth century. Feminist analysis would want to dispute the stereotype. Film realism has introduced new standards in the horrific, and audiences are less likely to be impressed by stereotype hags. The most readily available twentieth-century images of witches are not frightening: hags evoke Hammer House of Horror, fairy tales and radical feminists who claim to be revolting hags. The lack of terror is sometimes perceived to be a problem in relation to staging Macbeth, but it is a bonus in The Witch, where the hags are far more fun than terrifying.

Inga-Stina Ewbank speculates over how much the original performances of The Witch played on an audience’s experience of seeing the same performers play in Macbeth.30 There is also the question of whether the original performance of The Witch included a deliberate parody of Macbeth; this may be suggested by the large number of echoes of Macbeth in The Witch. I see these echoes working rather like the echoes of Hamlet in The Revenger’s Tragedy, mocking the earlier work. This could be a strength in performance: although it would be impossible to play The Witch now so that the audience could pick up on the Howard/Carr/Essex satire, it would be possible to play it as a satire of Macbeth, and to perform the two plays alongside each other would give The Witch real bite: for example, the basic impulse in all of the major narratives in The Witch is to go to the witches to effect some skullduggery, and the equanimity with which so many characters do this could be used to parody the agonisings of Macbeth over his encounters with witches.

There are no star parts in The Witch and no character that the audience can strongly identify with. The play condemns a corrupt society rather than focusing on one or two individuals. This can make The Witch appear ‘difficult’ for students and performers inculcated with the ideal of strong and convincing characterisation, as is often found in Shakespeare but less commonly in, for example, Jonson and Middleton. Shakespeare’s dominance in the repertory has been partially responsible for the emphasis on characterisation in British theatre, but The Witch clearly and deliberately takes a different path. However, because of the crowded narrative, characters need to be strongly individualised, for example by gesture and costume.

For the late twentieth-century theatre-goer perhaps the most stageworthy aspect of The Witch is its Ortonesque black humour. Another strength is the extraordinary and disconcerting swings in mood – from broad farce (Almachildes and the witches) to deadpan (the ending), from mordant humour (the callousness of Francisca’s plotting) to casual murder. This pattern of extraordinary swings in mood is set particularly effectively in the opening two scenes of the play.