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by Beverley Cooper, directed by Ann-Marie Kerr

Blyth Festival, Memorial Hall, Blyth

August 2-29, 2024

Maggie: “The dead are always with us”

It may be impossible to believe but the last time a person was convicted of pretending to use witchcraft in Canada was in 1919. The person was Margaret “Maggie” Pollock, born in Blyth on May 11, 1879, and died in 1931. Pollock’s life is the subject of Beverley Cooper’s new play The Trials of Maggie Pollock now having its world premiere at the Blyth Festival. Cooper, of course, is no stranger to writing about miscarriages of justice, her most famous play being Innocence Lost: A Play about Steven Truscott, which had its premiere at Blyth in 2008. In Maggie Pollock, Cooper portrays a situation in which man-made law is helpless to deal with a case that defies all attempts to categorize it.

From the age of 16 Maggie realized that she could see the spirits of the dead. While this frightened her at first, she, a devout Christian, came to see it as a gift from God to be used for good. News of her gift spread and people began to ask for Maggie’s help in finding lost objects or even in speaking to friends or relatives who had passed over. A single woman who shared the work on a farm with her brother, Maggie would charge a small amount to compensate her for her time. The case that began Maggie’s series of trials, both legal and spiritual, occurred in 1919 when a local farmer, John Lienhardt, came to Maggie to see if she could locate 15 bushels of oats that had been stolen from his barn. With the help of her spirit guide Kate, Maggie does locate the oats, Lienhardt pays her the 50¢ she asks for and he soon finds the oats and the thief just where she had told him.

This would seem innocent enough, except that Lienhardt had enlisted the help of a policeman to arrest the thief. Hearing how Lienhardt had found the thief, the policeman determined that charging a fee for occult knowledge was in breach of the law. In a Goderich court Maggie was convicted of being in violation of §365 of the Criminal Code of Canada as someone “who fraudulently pretends to exercise or to use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration”.

As one can see Maggie was not actually accused of witchcraft but, more bizarrely, of pretending to be a witch. The reason for this is that §365 was based on a similar British statute from 1735. As an Enlightenment law, it assumes that there are no such persons as witches. Claiming to be one, however, constitutes fraud. The problem is that Maggie made no such claim but for a fee gave advice. Her counsel, Mr. C. Garrow, appealed Maggie’s conviction to Osgoode Hall, where a tribunal upheld the conviction and sent Maggie back to Goderich for sentencing. The judgement was that Maggie was placed in the care of her brother and had “to refrain from pretensions of occult power and from practicing the occult science” on pain of payment of a $200 bond.

From Cooper’s point of view Maggie’s story is yet another example of men using their power to force an nonconformist woman to fit their ideas of normality. Men use the legal power in their hands to suppress the power beyond their ken that Maggie wields.

Cooper expands this notion by giving two familiar female spirits – one old, one young – who comment on what she does and what others do to her. Part of the mystery of the play is discovering who these spirits are and why they visit Maggie so frequently. The older one is Sarah Osborne (1643-92), one of first of the “witches” condemned to hang during the Salem Witch Trials who was executed in 1692. She is a character referred to but not seen in in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1953).

The younger character is an America woman named Kate, likely based on the famous medium Catherine Fox (1839-92), whom Maggie meets when she is sent to Buffalo to visit her aunt. It happens that Maggie’s aunt is also clairvoyant and is friends with Kate. Both women realize that Maggie has the “gift” and Kate urges Maggie to exploit it to earn a living, something Maggie finds repugnant. When Kate passes over, she becomes Maggie’s prime advisor on how to manager her skill to her best advantage. Thus, Cooper gives us two women quite unlike Maggie – in Sarah, an ordinary woman wrongfully condemned, and in Kate, a medium who exploits her gift.

Yet, beyond Cooper’s condemnation of male power over women, the play brings up the difficult question of belief. Throughout the action Cooper has us rooting for Maggie whether we believe in spiritualism or not. All of Maggie’s efforts in using spirits to locate objects or to contact the dead are shown to be successful. Cooper never questions the validity of Maggie’s gift and, as long as we are watching the play, neither do we. The action of the play is based very closely on historically documented events. Does that mean that Cooper’s play converts us to believe in spiritualism? Or does the play confront us, as Maggie’s case did the lawyers of the time, with a conundrum that does fit any of our categories of what should and should not be possible?

The role of Maggie Pollock is one of the best roles that Caroline Gillis has ever had. It is the first to allow her to display the great range of her talent. Gillis successfully portrays Maggie at different times in her life – at age 40 when she is arrested, at age 12 when she sees her first spirit, at age 20 when she is about to marry and at various ages between 20 and 40 when neighbours ask for her help. Gillis is marvellous in depicting the various stages of Maggie’s relationship with her spirits, from fear when they first appear to comfort when they become familiar companions. Throughout the action Gillis endows Maggie with dignity and strength that underlie her humble, unprepossessing nature. It is rich, vivid and memorable performance.

The other four actors each play a variety of roles. The one who seems assigned the largest number of roles is Cameron Laurie whose part is called “Younger Man”. We first meet him as Maggie’s brother, but he also plays John Lienhardt seeking clues about his stolen oats, Maggie’s boyfriend Tom and Maggie’s solicitor C. Garrow among others. These are all earnest young men, but Laurie subtly differentiates them primarily by tone of voice and style of gestures. His scene as Lienhardt is important because it sets the pattern of all the consultations Maggie has with people later. Laurie’s scene with Maggie as her fiancé is heartbreaking since the naïve young man can’t believe his parents’ accusations against the girl he loves could be true. When Maggie admits she does see spirits, Tom at first thinks she is joking but then, confused and upset, rejects her. Laurie plays Maggie’s lawyer as a young man fired up by the injustice Maggie faces. If Maggie believes she sees spirits, that fact is good enough for him.

J.D. Nicholsen plays the part called “Older Man”. This includes people associated with the law like Judge Henry Dickson at Maggie’s trials in Goderich, Chief Justice Sir William Meredith at Osgoode Hall and Constable A.J. Wharton, who arrests Maggie in 1919. The part also includes a mysterious uncle of Maggie’s who committed suicide who, for unknown reasons, always haunts Maggie. Nicholsen makes the Chief Justice more of a blusterer than the Judge in Goderich. In the Constable, however, he brings out an interesting mixture of by-the-book inflexibility and inherent curiosity at what kind of woman Maggie really is. Nicholsen has a wonderfully written scene with Maggie as Constable Wharton who visits Maggie two years after her sentencing. I won’t reveal its surprising content except that it is based on a documented incident.

Susan Stackhouse plays “Older Woman”, a part whose main component is the spirit of Sarah Osborne. Cooper uses Sarah as the mouthpiece for her comments on male oppression of women. Sarah notes that – of the 19 people executed as witches at Salem five were men but the vast majority then, and throughout history, were women. Sarah’s view is that men choose women as scapegoats when things go inexplicably wrong in the world. As a spirit counsellor, Stackhouse has Sarah constantly sound warnings about any of Maggie’s dealings with men. Using a completely different voice and demeanour, Stackhouse also plays Mrs. Grace Sinclair, who calmly gives testimony about how Maggie helped locate a lost ring of hers. Stackhouse can also be comical as one of the stuffy, British-accented male judges at Osgoode Hall.

Amy Keating plays “Younger Woman”, a part whose main component is that of the medium Kate Fox, both alive and as a spirit. Keating oddly does not make Kate as forceful a presence as she could, especially compared with her performance as Maggie’s Irish mother who has a secret of her own or as Abigail Williams, the raving, main accuser at the Salem Witch Trials.

Cooper has written her play in the modified Brechtian style familiar from many classic plays at Blyth, most notably in James Reaney’s Donnelly Trilogy 1973-75). Actors step out of character to announce a change in time and place and most actors play numerous roles large and small. As Cooper has written it, testimony in court is transformed into acting out the scene described. Sometimes, Cooper even places flashbacks within these flashbacks. Under Ann-Marie Kerr’s precise direction the action is admirably clear.

Kerr has the play begin with the actors creating eerie yet soothing sounds by playing singing glasses. I assumed we would hear these sounds throughout the action, but unfortunately this does not occur. The mystery of the various spirits’ appearance and disappearance would benefit from this sort of sonic accompaniment. Shawn Kerwin has cleverly designed a set made up of three components that can easily be moved to represent Maggie’s kitchen, a cell in the Huron County Gaol or a wood-panelled courtroom. Kerwin has had brilliant idea of how made the spirits appear and disappear. On each side of the three-part set there is a gauzy curtain. To appear a spirit moves forward through the gauze until it is in the everyday world with Maggie. This is a simple and elegant solution to a problem that could easily be over-produced.

The unusual story told in The Trials of Maggie Cooper is enough reason to see the play and to learn surprising facts of local history. But Cooper’s play brings up greater questions about how helpless the law can become in dealing with unfamiliar circumstances. Equal to the pull of the story is the beautiful performance of Caroline Gillis in the title role, an enlightening experience worth travelling any distance to see. Maggie’s last word in the play, “Listen!”, is an order we all should heed in all the varied circumstances of life.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Caroline Gillis as Maggie Pollock; Susan Stackhouse as Maggie’s aunt, Caroline Gillis as Maggie, J.D. Nicholsen as the spirit of Maggie’s deceased uncle and Amy Keating as Kate;  Caroline Gillis as Maggie Pollock and Cameron Laurie as C. Garrow with Susan Stackhouse, J.D. Nicholsen and Amy Keating as the tribunal in background. © 2024 Gil Garrett.

For tickets visit: blythfestival.com.