08 7 / 2014
The_Nightjar’s Review of The Crucible

Cross-posting a lovely review shared by a seasoned theatre-goer in the RA subreddit. Here’s a link to the original post, re-posted below with permission:

The_Nightjar: Hi! I promised I’d review it, so here I am. I saw it over the weekend with members of my family and we were all moved to tears, even my 6’2” other half was in bits afterwards - that’s how powerful this production is.

The Old Vic in the round is an extraordinary space, even if you are a seasoned theatre-goer (and I am). The auditorium is much smaller and more intimate than the impression given by seating plans and photographs and as soon as you enter you are hit by the smell - sort of like a headshop! I had no idea what it was other than that it was herbs of some sort, but it was very incense-like and immediately gave the atmosphere a heady and unreal quality. It wasn’t the only smell used during the play either - Elizabeth’s rabbit stew smelt pretty good!

The set was spare and bleak, with all decorative elements covered with grey fabric. It all helped to convey a hard, stark and,well Puritan, environment. All of that, along with the reverberating soundscape set up a feeling of forboding before the play even began.

We had great seats towards the front of the stalls and the action was mostly played towards us, which was great, although because it is in the round there are occasions when actors have their back to you or the view is not as clear as you would like. Having said this, the staging was fantastic and I don’t think I’d want to see The Crucible any other way.

The actors were right there in front of us, maybe a couple of metres away at most - every bead of sweat and gobbet of spit absolutely clear- and unbelievably intimate. Looking so closely, you can’t help but be drawn into the action. This I think is the secret of this production and what has set it so far above anything else on the London stage this year.

I’ll be honest - I had absolutely no idea that Richard was capable of the standard of performance he achieves here. Nothing he’s done on TV or film so far has shown anything like the range and subtlety he is capable of. Not his fault; he takes the work he’s offered, but God what an incredible surprise! I bought my tickets the day they went on sale and I was prepared for the whole thing to be mediocre, but to just have the thrill (for myself but also a family member who idolises RA) of seeing him live. I had no idea that I’d “accidentally” bought tickets for the theatrical event of the year. It was fantastic to be able to see this with other members of my family who had very little idea who he was. They certainly know now!

The rest of the ensemble are also absolutely excellent. Yael Farber certainly knows how to cast a play and she knows how to direct. The sheer physicality of the production is amazing. Richard picks up Abigail and Mary Warren at various points as if they were rag dolls. He’s obviously very strong, but well, you only have to look at him!

OK well I think I’ve droned on about this enough for now, but if anyone has any questions I’ll do my best to answer them

IWantToBeAPinUp ‏@AgzyM

@rashisama1 @heyerette There were 2 autograph hunters in line. Richard took one look at them and said: I'm not signing that! Respect!

IWantToBeAPinUp ‏@AgzyM

@rashisama1 @heyerette I'd sooner sell first born then my RA autograph

Noch ein Kurzbericht von Agzy:



Ich liebe ihren Humor:

Noch ein Kurzbericht von Agzy:



Ich liebe ihren Humor:

Der Herr Löwe ist voll im Proctor-Modus!

The Witches of West End
Ingrid D. Rowland


In his autobiography, Timebends, playwright Arthur Miller notes that The Crucible, his 1953 play about the Salem witch trials, seems to revive in places where tyranny has either recently toppled or is about to take over. What tyranny could be closing—or losing—its grip on London’s throat these days, given the fact that a production of The Crucible has just triumphed through the ritual Press Night on July 3 at the Old Vic Theatre?

The first reviewer to weigh in was Quentin Letts of that tabloid of tabloids, the Daily Mail, under the headline “The Incredible Hunk Casts his Spell”:

There were more women than men in the Old Vic audience for The Crucible. They were there to gawp at film star Richard Armitage, who takes the central role of John Proctor, the farmer whose one marital infidelity leads to a downfall of alleged devilry and witchcraft. Arthur Miller’s tragedy of witch-hunting in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 was written as a metaphor for the anti-communist excesses of Fifties America. It is a necessarily claustrophobic story, never easy to watch. You do not go to The Crucible for enjoyment—certainly not here, where director Yael Farber’s time-keeping has run out of control. At Wednesday’s preview we escaped just before 11pm. Long-winded Miss Farber obviously has little regard for theatregoers who catch trains to the suburbs. The glacial pace of her direction may create an oppressive atmosphere but it goes far beyond self-indulgence.

Evidently, a large female spectatorship by definition diminishes the importance of the performance, just as female readership is still thought, in many quarters, to diminish the importance of books more than a generation after the apogee of Mailer, Bellow, Roth, and Updike (consider the last of these writers’ irksome insistence on calling women’s sitting bones “haunches”)—or their Britannic counterparts, Amis (Kingsley) and Fleming (Ian). Yaël Farber, The Crucible’s director, is guilty, for her part, not only of that feminine specialty, self-indulgence (so often termed “artistic license” in the hands of male counterparts, beginning with Paolo Veronese when he appeared before the Venetian Inquisition in 1573 in an unsuccessful attempt to defend the presence of two drunken Germans and a dog in a painting of The Last Supper), but indeed of elitist self-indulgence, keeping the people from their commuter trains in heedless pursuit of her artistic vision.

That vision includes two opening vignettes that add to the production’s length but also set a mood: the lights come up on a pile of shoes, the actors file in silently and put them on, and then file out again. Then the barefoot Caribbean slave Tituba makes a slow circuit around the performance space, carrying a steaming kettle. Farber believes that theater is still a ritual, just as in ancient Greece, and these two moments are eminently classical: first the actors don their tragic buskins, the special dancing slippers they wear for the performance (Greek actors would also have put on their masks), and the orchestra space is consecrated to the god Dionysus. Here Tituba’s circuit marks off that same circular dancing floor, but it also evokes the initial incident that sparked the witchcraft trials, at least in Miller’s telling of them: a group of Salem girls were dancing in the woods with Tituba and telling fortunes when the local minister caught them at it. There is witchcraft afoot in this Salem, the literal witchcraft of Tituba and the girls, and the timeless magic of theater.

The Daily Mail’s Letts, however, has a more sober, manly view of the proceedings. No gawping here:

But what a hunk Mr Armitage is. Proctor’s first entrance is greatly powered by this actor’s physical magnificence. He smoulders more than any campfire and projects a palpable earnestness which sits well with his character.

Another critic, Nick Clark of The Independent, tweeted with greater self-awareness:

Richard Armitage was excellent as John Proctor. I imagine, like me, the other males in the audience suddenly felt very Beta.

Mr. Letts certainly sounds like a man afflicted with feelings of betadom when he carps:

Talking of voices, Mr Armitage’s is unexpectedly weak, echoey, croaky. It is not the voice you expect from such a beefcake. He also has a habit of raising his gaze towards the top of his skull, as though searching for crumbs in his eyebrows.

In this implicit plea for readers to love him for his witty phrasing, the critic betrays what is surely resentment as much as acuity; Armitage finds distinct voices for the characters he plays, and for John Proctor he has picked a gruff, growling bear, as raw at the edges as Proctor’s view of things. Resentment, of course, is the fuel that drives Miller’s complex play. Three of the tragic heroes caught in the toils of Miller’s intricate plot are pulled to their deaths by it: frail, sensible Rebecca Nurse and the two Titans, Giles Corey and John Proctor, who look on appalled as their neighbors’ resentment is implausibly but implacably transformed into accusations of witchcraft. These great oaks of men ultimately fall to the axe of pusillanimity.

The Crucible endures as drama because of the biting contrasts it draws between sanity and insanity, rationality and irrationality, and in the play these qualities are shared by men and women in equal measure. Miller pins his plot on Abigail Williams, the teenaged servant girl who resorts to witchcraft after she has been bedded by Proctor and dismissed by his jealous wife. Abigail (played by a fierce Samantha Colley) is a conniving, troubling figure, traumatized by her parents’ violent death and the harsh realities, social and sexual, of life as a servant in Puritan Massachusetts, but she is not the play’s sole villain. A band of screaming adolescent girls could not have driven the Salem trials forward without the solemn collusion of magistrates and ministers, the very embodiment of masculine probity (the word that falls like a blade from the lips of Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth in Miller’s script, and is barked out with chilling precision by Jack Ellis in a bravura performance).

Supreme sanity, in fact, resides in Miller’s female characters: Rebecca Nurse and, in a heartbreaking transformation, John Proctor’s plain, insecure wife Elizabeth (played with quiet grace by Anna Madely), whose sense of physical (hence sexual) inadequacy mirrored Miller’s own guilt-ridden preoccupation with Marilyn Monroe, whom he had met in Los Angeles shortly before beginning to write The Crucible. John Proctor “has found his own goodness” by the time he marches off to the gallows, but it is a goodness felt rather than reasoned. As his wife tells him, he is “a good man, only somewhat bewildered.” It is one of the signal strengths of Yaël Farber’s production (and a strength of Armitage himself in his portrayal of Proctor) that this staging of The Crucible is the work of a seamless ensemble, a collaborative enterprise that militates rather strongly against the idea of any one person’s self-indulgence, even if they have put on their acting boots at the beginning. Footballers gather for a huddle too before the game.

The significant presence of women theatregoers at The Crucible really means that a large number of women in and around London lead independent lives and exert independent judgment, to conclude, inter alia, that Richard Armitage is an actor worth watching for his acting no less than his physique, and that Yaël Farber is a director to reckon with. The production was advertised in advance as “visceral,” for Farber is famous for her physical demands on actors; and indeed this cast runs, leaps, screams, shouts, grapples, and throws fits with remarkable ferocity, apparently without injuring anyone in the process. That, too, could be self-indulgence, but what are actors’ bodies for if not to be used to the full to tell their tales?

The presence of a woman director at the Old Vic means that women are running the business of theater more actively than they may have in the past. It is not hard to search for one toppling tyranny in Britain, a tyranny that continues to threaten elsewhere around the globe: the tyranny of male over female. Arthur Miller can rest assured that The Crucible is once again speaking at a crisis point in society.

Yaël Farber’s production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is playing at The Old Vic in London through September 13.
July 8, 2014, 8:55 a.m.

Play review: “The Crucible”, Old Vic


Being a theatre student, I probably should have read Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’.

I haven’t. Before last Saturday, I seemed to have heard a lot about the play’s existence without actually having all that much of an idea of what it is actually about.

A few weeks ago, I’d been walking through Waterloo when the poster of Richard Armitage’s bearded face staring ominously back at me from outside the Old Vic caught my eye. My mum’s birthday was coming up, and if there are two things my mum likes, it’s theatre and Richard Armitage (harking back to those Robin Hood and the Vicar of Dibley days). I made a mental note to myself; birthday present sorted, then. I booked a couple of tickets, and last Saturday we set off for the Old Vic to see ‘The Crucible’.

There’s something particularly intriguing about theatre in the round. The theatre had been adorned with dirtied, off-white sheets which hung around the balcony, and the set compromised of a number of hard backed wooden chairs strewn around the surprisingly small stage space. The audience were seated all around; the air was heavy with smoke and anticipation.

‘The Crucible’ begins with a bang. Your attention is instantly captured by the clever staging and direction, minimal but incredibly effective. A haunting beat is set up by the character of Tituba dragging and scraping her feet across the floor, and in time with this the first ‘victim’ of withcraft is brought before the audience; Betty, limp and apparently lifeless, carried on the shoulders of the other girls. It was like watching a subtle, eerie dance routine, and it is a riveting start to a play which lasts all of three and a half hours, yet succeeds in holding tight to the audience’s attention.

The casting is as successful as the staging; Richard Armitage received a well-deserved roar of approval from the audience during the standing ovation, with his portrayal of John Proctor standing out as an intelligently layered and complex protaganist. His towering stature and seemingly effortless ability to command a room lends itself to an interesting contrast with many other characters; the tension between Armitage’s Proctor and Jack Ellis’s Deputy Governor Danforth spits and boils throughout the play, whilst the tenderness between Proctor and his wife, wonderfully played by Anna Madeley, is matched only by his simmering chemistry with Samantha Colley’s Abigail Williams .

In a cast of strong, emotive performances, Colley’s portrayal of Abigail Williams is another stand-out. Her Abigail sinks her teeth viciously into any chance at mayhem and vengeance, and does so with a lurking, underhand sense of sickening glee. Watching from the balcony, there were several moments in which I found my fists subconsciously clenched on my lap in instinctive response to Abigail’s nasty, vindictive cruelty, and the pious, self-righteous manner in which she carried herself as she ruined and took lives with her lies. When an actress makes you grit her teeth against utter loathing for her character, you know she’s done a good job.

‘The Crucible’ is an immensely enjoyable piece of theatre, spooky and unnerving in all the right ways. It is garnering well-deserved stellar reviews left right and centre, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone. Its run finishes on 13th September, so there’s plenty of time to catch it.

WELL DONE BOY.... klasse Ansage von Richard.... MEIN RESPEKT !!!!

genauso klasse wie Rufus letztes Jahr, wo er zu den Autogrammjägern sagte: "Nur ein Autogramm pro Person"

super.. bin begeistert ...

Der Herr Löwe ist voll im Proctor-Modus!

Damit macht er sich zwar schwer unbeliebt bei den kommerziellen Autogrammjägern, aber das macht nix! Damit wächst noch mehr mein Respekt.

You are the best, Richard! Gut gebrüllt, großer Löwe!

The Crucible, Old Vic by Heather Wells
Posted on 8 July 2014


How one can write a theatre review on seeing only half a production, I’m not too sure. However the second half was certainly formidable enough to warrant a response.

Ashamed to say, this was my very first visit to the Old Vic but my experience of watching Arthur Miller’s classic The Crucible was tenfold. Walking into the magnificent interior of the theatre-in-the-round, hits you with a sense of the wonder at the history of this building, London’s second oldest theatre after the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

A fan of Richard Armitage from his days in Spooks and as the dashing Mr. Thornton in Gaskell’s North and South, he also looks just the part on The Crucible poster adverts as the brooding John Proctor.

Based on the Salem witch trials, the characters undergo pressures so intensely, much like that of the metals and substances pressurised at soaring temperatures in a crucible. All kinds of questions of morality arise and we – the audience – are like court witnesses to the destruction and unravelling of an entire community.

From the damning and authoritative voices of the court to the hysteria of the violently shaking possessed girls, this is a terrifying and electrifying performance.

The play is a triumph under the lead of South African playwright-director Yaël Farber, whose own passion for Miller’s American masterpiece credits the original story, and aims for a honest depiction of the horrors of this historically true event.

The play was so intense from the moment I sat down to the moment I stood up. At times I struggled to breathe. It was a crippling performance, and therefore one I cannot forget. Nor should I try to, for in the words of Arthur Miller, ‘I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.’

I already described how strong his shoulders and his arms are ... but last time I noticed he's really thin! You can almost see his ribs! I laughed when my friend S said he was “tiny”....TINY???!!! She expected him to be much bigger...wow he looked tiny to me too on Saturday! I hope he will keep himself healthy during the summer, he looks really, really, exhausted already! The strange thing is that Richard's stage presence is really impressive, he looks so massive!

I also noticed that Richard has changed a little bit his approach to the fans at the stage door. He is incredibly sweet to come out every night to meet the fans (on Saturday there was a very long line) although he's probably very tired. However I’ve noticed that he's now more distant. The first week he was more cheerful and hugged everybody. Now he's always in a hurry. That is understandable, but the fans congratulating him should still make him happy. I don't know why but I find him very serious lately. (I’ve seen him four times over the last two weeks).

Frances Dodd @Flintbeach

New post: Review of The Crucible at the Old Vic - http://www.flintbeach.com

Simmering Intensity: The Crucible at the Old Vic

Posted by Flintbeach on Jul 8, 2014 in Art, Blog, Contemporary, London, Theatre | No Comments
The Crucible

From the moment the lights go down and from a back-lit fissure a figure half-shuffles, half dances forward to the sound of rhythms and guttural hums, you’re caught inside The Crucible. The play’s intensity simmers as the dark themes, lies and superstition unfold.

The play’s sparkling dialogue has lost nothing with time and remains relevant to contemporary situations. Are not the ever-present killings in the Middle East, a crucible if ever there was one, a kind of mass hysteria and indulgence of psychological religious extremes?

When Abigail Williams and her cabal of girls jolt into bodily spasms repeating whistle-blower Mary Warren’s words as if bewitched, John Protor, and John Hale movingly try to expose the pretence, adding their shouts to the hysteria of the moment. But the assertions fall on deaf ears. Better to believe the lies of the ‘invisible crime’ of witchcraft than believe that these girls are persistently and calculatingly lying. What justice is there when those in power rage forward with the wrong crusade? It’s chilling that when given new testimony Danforth questions how he can accept it when 12 who stood accused of the same crimes have already been hanged.

The production at the Old Vic is unmissable and the best thing I’ve seen in ages, even beating this season’s blood thirsty production of Titus Andronicus at the Globe. Richard Armitage is the devilishly handsome poster boy for the production, as Salem’s flawed central character and he is a towering strength. But this is a thrusting ensemble piece with stand-out performances by Samantha Colley as the revengeful hysteria –firestarter Abigail Williams and Jack Ellis as the self-righteous Deputy Governor Danforth.

Early morning for The Anglophile Channel tomorrow as we head to Bath to cover the unveiling of a new waxwork of Jane Austen at 11am! Then it's back to town for THE CRUCIBLE! Watch for my pre-show and #IntervalTweets