Ordinary

Nelly speaks to the dead. The living want to silence her. A chilling true tale of seances, secrets and state paranoia!

Ordinary is a haunting and timely new play from award-winning Bespoken Theatre, exploring the extraordinary true story of Helen Duncan—a working-class Scottish medium imprisoned in 1944 under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Evoking the paranoia of wartime Britain, the play poses gripping questions: Was Helen a fraud, a spy, or a genuine medium caught in a state-sanctioned witch-hunt? Ordinary is described as ”unforgettable, layered and sinister. theatre“. Staged with evocative minimalism, the production blends physical and Epic theatre with puppetry, mask, and surrealist vaudeville, immersing audiences in a multi-sensory world of wartime seances, shadowy propaganda, and gendered injustice.