Full marks as usual to The Grads for tackling difficult and challenging plays.  Their offerings in the Fringe this year are The Witch of Edmonton and Death and the Maiden.

The Witch requires the director to guide a sixteen strong cast through the tangled undergrowth of a 400 year-old tale that's he's already had to cut to fit a time slot.  It's a tale of witchcraft, belief in the devil, bigamy and murder with a daft laddie sub-plot thrown in.

Despite some excellent characterisations and imaginative staging it didn't quite come off for me, failing to generate the atmosphere of tension and fear that I think it needs.  With its awkward doors and undisguised function room appearance the venue doesn't help take us back to the world of seventeenth century life and beliefs either.

The action of Death and the Maiden on the other hand takes place in a modern domestic interior for which the venue is fine.

Patricia believes that a chance visitor to the isolated house by the sea that she shares with her husband Gerardo is the doctor who participated in the torture to which she was subjected fifteen years earlier during a period of dictatorship.  She determines to take the law into her own hands and wrest a confession from him.  Gerardo is appalled.  Not only is he a lawyer but has just been appointed to a commission established by the new democratic government to look into the misdeeds of the old regime. 

So the stage is set for a debate about justice and revenge, do two wrongs make a right, what value has a forced confession and so on.  It's very well done and the question of whether or not he is the man she thinks he is is never resolved.  You have to make up your own mind.