The Alice Project
Various venues, Kilkenny
★★★★★
There’s something of a cult television miniseries about The Alice Project, now in its third year: absorbing and cosy, full of vibrant characters and supernatural activity. It’s emphatically a community project, a reimagining of a historical witch-hunt within a community, played out largely by local Kilkenny actors.
Its huge cast spans generations, mixing professionally trained performers with children with little or no experience. More than once, queuing for an episode, I overhear people involved talking about how much the children have loved taking part and saying there are tears now it’s coming to an end.
The story, of course, is that of Alice Kyteler, the wealthy 14th-century Kilkenny woman accused of witchcraft. In Episode 2, the Parade Tower at Kilkenny Castle becomes the prison of the bishop, who has summoned us as journalists to spread the word of Christ. Behind him hangs the sign “Say No to Heresy”.
John Rice is brilliant as the bishop, combining bloodless intensity, high-church campiness and distinctly Trumpian mannerisms. His address includes seven rules for avoiding heresy, among them, don’t copulate with demons.
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Episode 4: The Words of the Accused is more intimate and more frightening. At the Home Rule Club we are greeted as terrified members of Alice’s community and ushered into a pub: the bishop has published a list of the condemned and, through association with Alice, we are all on it.
Muireann Ryan is excellent as Alice, arriving dressed in red: vibrant, quick, delightfully false and spectacularly out for number one. She makes her goodbyes, and then we see her through the pub window, legging it.
Violet Butler’s Petronella de Meath gives the episode its stranger register. Is she going mad or perceiving something real beneath this society? In a moment of magical realism, she stares horrified at the fireplace while those around her make witchy hand gestures and speak in a robotic, dead-eyed way. Then the bishop’s boys arrive, genuinely frightening enforcers who bundle the company into a van for trial.
The scripts frequently say the quiet part out loud. Petronella asks the bishop whether he would persecute Alice this way if she were a man, and eventually declares that Alice’s name will be honoured while his will be ranked alongside the tyrants of history. Who cares, though: the schlockiness works; its earnestness is part of the project’s charm.
Episode 5, the thrilling finale, transforms the grand grounds of St Kieran’s College. Epic music plays; sinister masked guards hold their posts; journalists livestream proceedings in different languages. The bishop appears illuminated in a Gothic window, a golden globe on his head, as a choir sings.
Then the children perform a pantomime that recaps the entire plot for anyone who missed an episode, which is a pure delight. There is fire and even a breathtaking aerial-acrobatics act. The spectacle is visually stunning, the sheer scale of the community takeover impressive: a city turning its own history into theatre, itself into the cast, and clearly having so much fun with it.
