There is a child in your house who is not your child. You know it in the way that you know things you cannot explain: by the barely perceptible shift in the air, the impossibly faint sound of laughter … or your body’s certainty that something is just …. off. This feeling, elusive and unsettling, is what spindle collective has built their second full-length play around.
síofra, written and co-produced by Natalia Bushnik and Kathleen Welch, is premiering at Toronto’s Red Sandcastle Theatre, in association with Eldritch Theatre. The play is the second instalment in their Dark Mother Trilogy, a triptych of folklore-rooted horror plays that moves from Romania (SAMCA) to Ireland (síofra) to Germany (the forthcoming spilleHOLLE, which audiences got a taste of at last January’s Dead of Winter festival). Each of the plays stands alone and traces a different horror-tinged dimension of motherhood through the lens of the specific country’s mythology.
From SAMCA to siofra
The project did not begin as a trilogy. As horror often does, it took on a life of its own … and became one. “We wrote SAMCA (reviewed here by Sesaya Arts) in COVID times, and it was on its own for a long time,” says Welch. “And then Nat had an idea. She was interested in changeling folklore … in writing a play about it, and invited me in on that. And as we were working on síofra, we started seeing all the ways the two plays connected together.”
The connective tissue is motherhood, approached from different angles, at different stages of a woman’s life. With síofra, the access point is harrowing. Bushnik traces the play’s genesis to a true crime case from early 1900s Ireland, in which a woman was killed by her community because they had come to believe she was no longer herself—that she had been replaced by a fairy.
“The play doesn’t really have anything to do with that anymore,” Bushnik clarifies, “but the initial impetus of it was that this woman was murdered, and part of the reason may have been group hysteria, like a town panic. Basically, they believed that she had been switched. She was a changeling … a fairie.” Bushnik had been thinking about motherhood, and she found herself wondering about postpartum depression: “What does that look like when lined up with the folklore of Changelings? How do those two things—that mental illness and that sickness—how can they line up with the folklore that we’re exploring?”
Set in Belclare, Ireland in the late 1800s, síofra follows a newlywed couple who choose to build their home on a fairy mound at the foot of the famed Knockma Hill. The world of the play is populated by believers and sceptics alike, and that tension is a dramatic engine. “We’re playing with that difference in all the people in the town,” says Welch, “and with the idea that this is land that would be up for grabs because some people just won’t build on it. But it offers an opportunity to people who can’t afford other land, and might not have those superstitions.” And Welch is fascinated by what follows when you occupy a space that is already claimed — by fairies, by folklore, and by belief: “People who are doubters… what kinds of things might then happen in their lives to make them believe that they’re being punished for the space they’ve taken up?”
The changeling’s origin story
The play had a long gestation before reaching the stage. The first draft was developed at the Warbler’s Roost Artist Residency, and the script was workshopped with actors throughout 2025 before Bushnik and Welch felt it was ready. The care they have taken is evident in the production team assembled for the Toronto premiere. síofra features a large ensemble for Red Sandcastle’s intimate stage: it consists of Bushnik, Darius Rathe, Justin Otto, Rachel Offer, Eldritch Theatre’s Eric Woolfe, Jeanie Calleja, Susan Wesson, and Claire Haig-Halsall. Welch directs, with stage management by Leah Wilton, lighting design by Brendan Kinnon — who also directed SAMCA with Riot King — and set construction and Irish cultural consultation by Ciarán Connaire.
Welch is candid about the challenge of stepping into the director’s chair for a script she co-wrote. “I find directing a little bit stressful, because it feels like you’re in charge of everything, rather than just being kind of in charge of yourself,” she says. “We wrote it with a lot of visual and interesting things, without thinking about how it would be to stage.” In her directorial identity, these have become her problems. “Yes, I regret some things,” she smiles ruefully. “There are a few stage directions where” the only way out is just to say “Cut it!’”
Bushnik and Welch wrote much of síofra during a week-long writer’s retreat, where they traded scenes, read aloud, and discovered the story together in real time. Their collaboration has since moved to a near-telepathic level: on a subsequent retreat for spilleHOLLE, they independently wrote the same scene without any prior coordination. And they have become adept at fusing Welch’s music and soundscapes to the drama. Bushnik attributes this synchronicity to the complementary way they each think about the work. “I, myself, am a very physical learner. I come from dance, so I’m constantly thinking of pictures of what everything moves and looks like…. We kind of write in a multidisciplinary mindset… whenever Kathleen composes a song, I can already see, plot-wise, exactly where it’s going to lift something up.”
How scary is it?
The creators are quick to claim síofra for the horror genre, but Welch describes this second instalment as darkness in a quieter register. “The horror comes in a more realistic, maybe more human way than it did in SAMCA, where it was more like ethereal witchcraft. This is more human horror, rooted in what we do to each other—and an underlying feeling of unsettlingness.”
(We don’t think that’s a real word, but we love the idea that the creepiness of their art pushes them beyond language).
And while their work is built to frighten and unsettle us, we’re curious about what frightens them. For Bushnik, it is the almost-wrong: “when something’s just slightly off. A jump scare or the reveal of a monster is not going to do anything for me, but if an energy shift is just a little bit strange, or I see something that doesn’t quite belong there — everything’s a little bit off – that’s what gets me.” It’s the reason she has never been able to get through Lewis Carroll’s topsy-turvy-weird Alice in Wonderland. Welch puts a finer point on her own fear: “Unknown and unexplained things probably scare me the most. I’m not scared by something I can see—like there’s a bear there, or logical things to be afraid of.” Instead, it’s what she can’t see: “I’m in the tent, and my brain goes crazy with the unknown sounds and things that aren’t fully explained.”
Beyond the trilogy
While they are excited to share siofra, both women are also thinking beyond the trilogy. spindle collective produced the inaugural Dead of Winter Horror Festival (reviewed here by Sesaya Arts) this past winter, and they are committed to growing it as a platform for fringe horror theatre. Bushnik speaks about the genre with the clarity of someone who has thought about almost nothing else. “Horror has a way of revealing things as they are,” she says. “It deals with the darkest, dirtiest parts of humanity, and there’s freedom when you explore it and sit with it.” She also can’t help herself: “I’m drawn to it because it’s such a challenging thing to do on stage: to go that dark, go that far. The excitement and curiosity take my brain and keep it there.”
And in the meantime, siofra is here to take your brain … if you’ll offer it.
síofra runs June 17–28, 2026 at the Red Sandcastle Theatre, 922 Queen Street East, Toronto. Tickets are available at eldritchtheatre.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
