At a moment when women’s bodily autonomy and rights remain stubbornly contested worldwide, Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin arrives in its Canadian premiere at Soulpepper Theatre, co-produced with The Howland Company and Crow’s Theatre, with a haunting, ultimately crushing reminder: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Set in rural England in 1759’s “Year of Victories” — when England’s imperialist agenda was advanced by several dramatic battlefield wins around the globe, while at home, the rich got richer and the poor lost access to land and life at an accelerating pace — this gripping historical drama depicts a jury of twelve women who must decide the fate of a condemned thirteenth.
The premise is dramatic and deceptively straightforward: a young woman has been sentenced to hang for a heinous crime, but claims pregnancy, invoking the medieval law of “pleading the belly”. Twelve wives of different ages, origins and classes are assembled to determine whether she speaks truth:. The verdict of this “jury of matrons” will mean either death or life and transportation to America. Kirkwood’s play, which premiered at the National Theatre in London in 2020, is both a chamber deliberation thriller and a forensic analysis of the female body as a cultural battleground where medicine, morality, and male authority intersect.
Under outgoing Soulpepper Artistic Director Weyni Mengesha’s meticulous direction, this feels like iconic courtroom drama 12 Angry Men reimagined through the voices of rural women, and shot through with touches of Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” — in its wit, scope, sense of place, and uncanny strategies for making historical moments feel cosmically present.
Mayko Nguyen delivers a tour-de-force performance as midwife and reluctant participant Lizzy Luke, bringing fierce intelligence and barely contained fury to her role as the jury’s most qualified, best-connected and (we will discover) most deeply conflicted member. Opposite her, Bahia Watson crafts an unforgettable Sally Poppy, the condemned woman whose profound unlikability forces us to confront our prejudices about who deserves mercy. Olunike Adeliyi, Ghazal Azarvbnad, Nadine Bhabha, Brefny Caribou, Raquel Duffy, Kyra Harper, Fiona Highet, Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, Anna Luján, Natasha Mumba, Liisa Repo-Martell, and Hallie Seline round out the jury in a murderer’s row of Toronto’s finest female performers, each bringing distinctive life to their characters in spotlight moments, while also maintaining the production’s delicate ensemble balance.
Julie Fox’s set design transforms the Baillie Theatre into a claustrophobic slice of 18th-century England. This begins in the riveting opening scene, set in a dark farmhouse. It establishes both the period and the stakes with some high-wire acting from Watson’s Sally and Cameron Laurie as husband Frederick Poppy, with little more than a candle casting ominous shadows. Fox and Lighting Designer Bonnie Beecher do tremendous work transforming the bold, simple set — an earthy, naturalistic room that features a fireplace at right, a window at left, and a table and chairs between — from a farmhouse to a yard, to a courtroom, then finally to the stark, full-light reality of the jury room filled with its all-woman jury and their mostly silent monitor Mr. Coombes (Craig Lauzon).
Thirteen women in period costume filling this set is an unusual, powerful and striking sight, and Mengesha places them thoughtfully, in order to illuminate their affiliations and highlight their differences — and to spark drama through their conversations, revelations, glances and movements. The room is buffeted by the screams of bloodthirsty crowds outside the window, and by ghostly memories that haunt these women’s lives and spill out in their conversation, creating an auditory poetry that refracts and amplifies the core plot and themes.
Kirkwood’s script and Mengesha’s direction string us along with the familiar beats of historical and courtroom dramas. There is humour aplenty in the peccadillos of the individual jurists and in their exchanges (my sense is that there was even more here to be mined). And I found myself lulled into expecting, even wanting, to arrive at some Steel Magnolias-like female solidarity, complete with bonding across class lines and triumph over patriarchal systems. But the play undermines these expectations repeatedly, forcibly and unapologetically. As it progresses, its title “The Welkin” (an archaic word for the vault of heaven) becomes increasingly ironic, and ultimately tragic. These women are ostensibly reaching for divine truth, but they remain excruciatingly earthbound: constrained by their time, their prejudices, and the male-defined systems that imprison them literally and figuratively, body and soul.
The tough truth is that none of the twelve jurists is especially likeable. And their bickering and diverse prejudices, while rooted firmly in 1759, are painfully familiar to modern ears. As plot revelations tack backwards and forwards, they reveal layers within layers within layers … which alternately engross us and jolt us back to the present. Indeed, through a multitude of dramatic strategies – from jarring anachronisms to deliberate tonal shifts and those incredibly brutal plot twists — the production refuses to allow us uncritical enjoyment of the (genuine) suspense of this historical drama.
Instead, forced from our immersion by laughter, shock, rueful recognition or by reminders of the comet-like inevitability with which history repeats itself, we face stubborn and uncomfortable truths about how little has changed in women’s agency over their own bodies, stories and fates.
The vault of heaven is a mirage or worse, a trick. And beneath it lie no easy answers or comfortable resolutions: just absorbing, challenging, superbly mounted and acted theatre that demands to be seen – and demands that we see ourselves in its unforgiving mirror.
The Welkin runs at Soulpepper’s Baillie Theatre through October 5, 2025. Tickets are available at soulpepper.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
