Ich freue mich total über die guten Kritiken in der Times und im Telegraph! Vergesst die Daily Mail, die kann man nicht ernst nehmen.

Ich freue mich total über die guten Kritiken in der Times und im Telegraph! Vergesst die Daily Mail, die kann man nicht ernst nehmen.

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Hail Yael. Miss Farber, the South African playwright/director whose Mies Julie was outstanding, has done it again, giving London one of its most exciting evenings in the theatre this year.

Her style, combining physical theatre with sensitive interpretation of text, is well suited to the intimacy of the Old Vic's current configuration, which features a tiny playing space in-the-round.

This is minimally furnished by designer Soutra Gilmour, bare wooden furniture fitting well with the drab, puritanical clothing that was de rigueur in Massachusetts in the late 17th century.

From a chilly and unsettling opening, beautifully lit by Tim Lutkin, the production gets its claws into viewers and doesn't let go for the next 3½ hours.

Richard Armitage, star of Spooks and The Hobbit movies, plays John Proctor in Arthur Miller's classic allegory exploring the activities of the witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee, which he eventually faced as an alleged Communist.

Rather than setting his play in the 1950s, the writer sought to draw a parallel in Salem where real witches (or not) had been persecuted some two and a half centuries previously.

As with so many of Miller's protagonists, Proctor is a flawed but ultimately decent man. He also had the good fortune to be married to staunch Elizabeth, played with great feeling by Anna Madeley, whose morals are unimpeachable, backed by a faith that even torture could not cow.

Her husband's tragic fate was settled long before the events depicted, after this intrinsically good man fell prey to the weakness of the flesh, sleeping with his servant Abigail Williams, surely never portrayed with greater vindictiveness than here by Samantha Colley, making a professional stage debut which suggests that she will have a long and prosperous future in the acting profession.

Abigail is in good company in a village where the local pastor Parris is a materialist more interested in creature comforts than his parishioners' souls, while others will condemn neighbours to death in order to acquire their land.

Not all are bad, since William Gaunt's Giles Corey and Rebecca Nurse played by Ann Firbank are surely destined for Heaven, even if the religious zealots who imprison and kill them are more likely to find the Devil an eternal bedfellow.

They fall into two camps, those certain of their rectitude headed up by Jack Ellis as inquisitor, Deputy Governor Danforth and the doubters, Adrian Schiller's Reverend Hale in the vanguard.

The centre of this play is the battle that John Proctor, always assisted by the worthy Elizabeth, fights against his own demons made flesh on the stage by a bevy of manic young women. The best scenes in the evening feature the booming-voiced Armitage and the pained Miss Madeley giving what is in effect an acting master class as their characters bravely approach the doors of hell, heads held high.

Yael Farber has been lucky enough to cast a wondrous team of actors, every one of whom plays his or her part, in conveying the dangerous tight-rope walk between good and evil that a whole village and its environs fought in a tale drawn from real life.

The denouement offers hope for mankind and tops off an entrancing evening that should be on everybody's must-see list.

Fünf Stern von Times und Telegraph sind sehr gut. Die Daily mail spricht das schon diskutierte Problem mit der Stimme an, bei dem ich akzeptieren muss, dass es existiert, auch wenn es die DM ist. Und die Eigenheit, die Augen nach oben zu rollen, so dass man unten das Weiße sieht, stört mich schon seit ewigen Zeiten.

Das hat auch mit der Anatomie der Augenhöhle, der Augenlider und der Augenaufhängemuskeln zu tun. Sie Dir einmal in Spooks 7.6 die Szene an, in der Harry Ros und Lucas über Sugarhorse aufklärt. Hermione Norris hat vollständig anders geformte Lider. Die könnte ihr Weißes niemals so sichtbar machen.

Genau, es ist ganz einfach die RAnatomie!

Ich bin jetzt mal so richtig auf den Guardian gespannt!! Bis jetzt ist noch nichts online.

Alexandra Coghlan ‏@AlexaCoghlan 53 Min.
A five-star Crucible from the Old Vic http://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/crucible-old-vic … @theartsdesk

The Crucible, Old Vic
The Old Vic's Crucible explodes with physicality and thoughtful intensity
by Alexandra CoghlanFriday, 04 July 2014 Share

"I saw Goody Good with the Devil": the girls of Salem band together to seize their new authority
Johan Persson
The posters all over the Underground scream Richard Armitage. As far as they are concerned The Crucible is the finest one-man-show since Clarence Darrow. But what we get in performance is something much more thrilling (if less pin-uppable): a ferocious ensemble piece, fresh and urgent, that turns the moral and emotional screw over three and half exhilarating – yes really – hours.
If ever there was a play worth gutting the Old Vic to turn it into a theatre-in-the-round then it’s Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – a work which invites us all to judge and be judged, to gaze suspiciously at our neighbours and shrink from theirs in our turn.
Armitage makes a fine job of John Proctor, but it’s Madeley who moves
Confined in these close quarters, this Crucible becomes more the chamber drama it really is than the crowd piece it can so easily become – a story that plays out not in the courtroom itself but the anteroom, in a cell, a bedroom, a stable. These are private, domestic dramas suddenly elevated to public spaces in which they do not belong, and intruding on their grubby intimacy we feel that same discomfort, that same distaste, for a regime the peers in at windows and into hearts to assess and condemn.
Director Yaël Farber plays things straight. Some may balk at the long running time, but there’s little clutter or bagginess of thought in a visually traditional production that allows Miller’s allusive parable to work its premise through to its devastating conclusion. If pushed, I could do without the silent framing dramas that begin Acts I and II, rich in gothic ritual and domestic details, respectively, but the stillness of these opening moments does effectively anchor the force and physicality of what’s to come.
In such a long piece pacing is all, and Farber’s arcs are carefully managed. Directing in one long dramatic legato, she finds the inner emotional rhythms of Miller’s long scenes, setting the staccato encounters of Deputy Governor Danforth (Jack Ellis) against the sustained unspokens of John and Elizabeth Proctor (Richard Armitage, pictured above with Natalie Gavin as Mary Warren, and Anna Madeley).
The charge between this husband and wife is live indeed. Proctor’s encounter with Abigail (a fierce, sullen Samantha Colley) is long since past here, transformed into violence – a chemistry quietly but surely displaced by Madeley’s soft dignity and fragile determination. Armitage makes a fine job of John Proctor – a roaring, contrarian beast of a man who shouts because he cannot be heard, but it’s Madeley (pictured left with Armitage) who moves.
The surrounding cameos glow with human detail in Soutra Gilmour’s shadowy sets: Ann Firbank’s forthright martyr Rebecca Nurse; Harry Atwell’s Thomas Puttnam, crawling and convulsing with anger and jealousy; the misplaced learning and logic of Jack Ellis’s Danforth. And then there are the girls. Moving as one, staring and silently accusing, their courtroom hysteria is horrible and very, very believable.
Every generation adds their own ingredient to Miller’s Crucible. Mixed in with the perennial instincts of revenge, jealousy, hysteria and self-preservation are more topical thoughts and reactions. It’s hard to watch the women here obsessively adjusting their all-covering headscarves, to hear Danforth’s horror that the girls were “dancing”, to witness the mindless solution of violence offered in the name of faith, and not think of the recent developments in Iraq and Syria. It’s an important time to be reminded that Christianity has its own dark history of fundamentalism and oppression in the name of religion, that these are conflicts we have lived before.
As we face one another across Farber’s circular space, reflected back on ourselves hundredfold, we bear witness not only to an alien tragedy but to our own history, just as Miller intended.