BARNESTORMING

DRAMACAST

THE BEWITCHED

True to its title, the play focuses on bewitchment by secular and religious authority, which both intentionally and unintentionally employs murder, torture, intimidation, and entertainent for the purpose of bewitching the populace. It even utilises murder, torture, intimidation as entertainment. Insidiously, those who bewitch are themselves bewitched, for the authorities beleieve in the system that gives them power. So self-deluded are some of them, they think that their mere words can turn defeat into victory. (Bernard Dukore)

'Nothing's more vital than our prejudices, those opinions we accept unexamined. Wi'out prejudices, no religion, no morality, no submission. We hunger f' the blessings o'blind ignorance, Lord.'

'Blind chance rules the world.'

From John Bull, (Contemporary Dramatists):

In The Bewitched Barnes turned to a key moment in modern European history, the problems over the succession to the grotesquely inbred Phillip IV of Spain. The effect of the transference of power on the lives of the powerless through-out Europe is heightened dramatically by the Court's own total lack of concern for them, all interest being centered on explanations of, and attempts to rectify, the ruler's impotence...

The central metaphor that links a mad incapacity with political power is here used to far more telling effect, and the result is one of the most thrillingly disturbing plays of the modern period.