**** (4 stars)
“Sombre”
False Tongues is particularly apposite in an era when ‘fake news’, aka lies, can spread swiftly round the world and result riots, injustice, persecution and worse, all without the slightest justification or basis in truth. Why is it so easy to swallow such garbage just because ‘I saw it on the internet’?
In 1692 social media hadn’t been invented, but another means of spreading lies and causing untold harm to innocent people had been around for millennia – gossip. Whispering behind your hand “I’ve heard that…”, “They say…”, “did you know…?” All this was rife in Salem, Massachusetts, where people started making accusations of witchcraft against people, mostly but not all women. People were arrested and imprisoned, trials were held, and executions ordered. Much of the evidence against the accused came from reported visions – so-called ‘spectral evidence’. In just over a year, more than 200 people were accused, 30 were found guilty; others died in the foul prison conditions without coming to trial. Some time after this, various of the young women who’d made the accusations confessed that they’d made up the evidence ‘for a prank’.
Such accusations were not particularly unusual. A century earlier, James VI of Scotland had written the definitive book on how to recognise and dispose of witches. Anywhere where women were old, wrinkly, tended to mutter to themselves, kept a cat, were slightly different… other people would be quick to point a finger and make the accusation. Neighbours would become fearful that the same thing would happen to them: easier to join in with the pointing finger, look for something odd or different, accuse before you are accused…
Not so very different from today, it seems, where people are quick to attack anyone who dares to be different, or speak out in support of marginalised people, or criticise the Establishment. Earlier this Fringe I watched Box Tale Soup’s spine-chilling rendition of George Orwell’s 1984: today Britt FIshel & Artists presented this moving meditation on the unjust fate of so many people through the ages.
Focusing on Salem, and using footage shot in and around Salem and its graveyard, three dancers embodied both persecutors and the women they persecuted. Moving to a compelling soundtrack, menacing figures clad in black writhed and juddered, singly and in unison, weaving around each other, feeding off each other, working themselves up into a silent frenzy. Removing their sombre costumes they emerged clad in white, dancing their pain and suffering, their isolation and their togetherness before falling to the ground, dead. Throughout the show accuser and accused were sometimes the same person – the one whom you trust today may tomorrow turn on you and betray you.
At the end we saw listed the names of the women and men who were executed, and those who died in prison. Saddest of all was the infant, name and age unknown, of Sarah Goode, who’d been hanged a few weeks previously.
Will we ever learn?
False Tongues, Lime Studio at Greenside @George Street (Venue 236) for more information go to: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/false-tongues
ScotsGay Arts 