FringeReview Scotland 2025
The Devil’s Mark: The Story of the Scottish Witch Trials
Theatre Alliance

Genre: Community Theatre
Venue: Cutty Sark Centre, Ayr.
Festival: FringeReview Scotland
Low Down
Conceptually hits the mark with a community of today’s women telling the tale of another community of women from the past ill-used and destroyed. It was directed with real and admirable conviction and performed with a similar set of secure belief. Technically challenging with a venue not a natural theatre space but giving weight to the informality and the structure of the writing which managed to entertain, inform and infuriate – in the right way.
Review
When you sit in an auditorium looking at the faces of friends and family who have turned up in order to support their loved ones, seeing the glow and glee etched upon their face as a wee one is standing at the side of a stage waiting to come on, the pride significant and writ large across from their eyebrows down to their chin it’s cute. When that’s done for an adult who is about to emerge from the double doors behind you, it reminds you just exactly what the power of theatre is. It is not just about the story that appears on the stage, but the one that transcends just not the footlights, but also the heart-rendering issues that allow people to step up and step on and give a performance that is part of themselves. Here 17 women took the stage to tell the story of women in Scotland centuries before.
Upon their faces were their own experiences to live a life in the 21st century. The resonance of the ideas of today made me reflect upon whether or not the torture that was endured by women centuries ago, who were made to appear physically naked, exposed to their world, and tortured is any different to the emotional nakedness that people feel today when they are vilified and attacked on social media.
It was an auspicious beginning, something that reminded me of why we sat in darkened rooms and listened to such compelling stories being told.
The Devil’s Mark tells four of those stories. One of a howdie, a midwife, whose ability to provide cures and potions for people was partly what condemned her, but more importantly, what marked her out was not the success she had, but the information that she kept.
There was a businesswoman, a difficult woman to like, who happened to make her own way in the world but did so after her husband had died, and she had to fend for herself. The people who crossed her ended up being ill, not as a consequence, clearly, of falling out with her, but this was used as a whispered reasoning behind closed doors and in shadows as evidence , leading to her being “exposed” as a witch.
Then there was one woman who admitted she did have a spirit guide and was condemned when she was simply unable to help people when their causes were no longer capable of such help. She ended up condemned and accused, partly because she had honesty the curse of honesty and faith.
Finally, there was a woman who turned up in a place with no man, no weans, but found great wonder expressed around the community about her desire, simply, to be on her own. They drove her out, as others had done before. But this time, on the way out, she was tapped on the shoulder and brought back to be condemned.
As a community production, the 17 people on stage did indeed have a difference of experience and therefore of craft available to them. But what was most remarkable was not just the way in which they had the capability of keeping us all enthralled with the stories, but the way in which it was woven in and out seamlessly with their choreographed movement.
Community theatre allows for a sense of unity. That unity here saw all onstage all the time, providing support and strength between and betwixt them to bring a narrative and simple exposure to tales buried underneath the misogyny of centuries. It was 17 women glad to be women, proud to be women and proud to be able to tell the stories of the women that had never had the opportunity to. At times, however, when actors seemed a little less confident. Given their personal abilities , this was a minor criticism because they all had plenty of craft drilled in rehearsal to give credence to their portrayals. Group work shone and I was enthralled by some of the set pieces – the piece with the individual lights in particular.
The narrative structure made it work well. The choreography was apt, deftly woven into the fabric of the narrative, with a mix of music telling of now and suggesting then, which allowed us to see the connection between the two. It was riddled with visual metaphors and tableau which told how these people were treated and was not overplaying the tragedy but leaving our own shock at a sense of shame we ought to feel for the actions of our ancestors. It sometimes needed, however, to have a more secure handle on the volume of each sound cue to find a balance.
There was little by way of a set and, given that we were in a place that was not a natural theatre, it could perhaps have moved itself from the traditional seating and raised dais set up as it needed raked seating for decent sight lines.
Having said that, the delight that you felt when people came off hand in hand, absolutely proud as they should be over what they had performed, makes all of that a small-scale criticism in the context, of a pretty impressive triumph.