Also ganz so inflationär, wie Mr. Shenton es darzulegen versuchte, scheint es mit den Fünf- Sterne - Reviews dann doch nicht zu sein- und The Crucible strahlt mit seinen 5 Fünf- Sterne Reviews der Großen dann doch unter den anderen hervor .
Michael Billington vom Guardian beispielsweise hat von 102 Reviews nur 4 Produktion mit fünf Sternen bewertet.


Die Kritiker sind fast alle von TC begeistert, das Gros der Besucher- zumindest wenn man die große Mehrheit der Tweeter ansieht- was will man mehr ?!

David Tennants Richard II mit der RSC letztes Jahr hatte auch vorwiegend vier Sterne.

Die Untersuchung bezieht sich aber hauptsächlich auf den Guardian. Das würde bedeuten, dass der Guardian die entscheidenden Kritiken verfasst. Ich stimme selten mit den Kritiken von Herrn Billington überein. Dass er quasi als einziger A View from the Bridge nur 4 Sterne bewertet - was ja laut KatherineD die Produktion schlechter macht als TC - ist eine Frechheit!

Und auch die Auswahl, wer jetzt allgemein die bedeutendsten Rezensionen abliefert, ist ja auch ziemlich subjektiv. Es soll Theaterbesucher geben, die den Kritiken der Mail glauben - ich kenne zwar niemanden persönich und könnte es nicht wirklich verstehen, aber das ist meine persönliche ansicht - obwohl Quentin Letts natürlich fast immer unrecht hat und menschenverachtend schreibt. Whatsonstage ist auch nicht unwichtig - und da hat TC eben auch nur 3 Sterne bekommen - die Theater drucken deren 4 oder 5 Sterne auch auf Ihre Plakate.

Ich will auch niemanden die Freude über die insgesammt tollen Bewertugen nehmen, nein! Ich freue mich auch sehr darüber - vor allem für Richard Aber man sollte das Ganze auch mit ein wenig ausgewogener Nüchternheit betrachten und eben nicht nur das herausstechende Positive focussieren.

Ich glaube, sie streicht den Guardian heraus, weil der besonders wenige hohe Bewertungen vergibt? Und den Vergleich mit den Stücken von DT, BC und TH finde ich auch sehr interessant, denn wie oft haben wir (ich ) geklagt, dass diese Herren eben nicht nur in Blockbustern sondern auch in hochgepriesenen Theaterstücken mitspielen und RA nicht.

Wir werden sehen ob die "Inflation" weiter geht. Morgen ist press night von Martin Freemans RIII.

The Crucible – reviews of 'unmissable' Old Vic revival
Richard Armitage in The Crucible
Critics mesmerised by Arthur Miller's classic parable of paranoia starring Richard Armitage
LAST UPDATED AT 07:37 ON Tue 8 Jul 2014

What you need to know

A revival of Arthur Miller's The Crucible starring Richard Armitage has opened at the Old Vic, London. South African Yael Farber (Mies Julie) directs this production of Miller's fictionalised account of the 1692 Salem witch trials in Massachusetts, which he intended as a metaphor for the McCarthy-era persecution of suspected communists.

Set in a small town rife with gossip and grievances, it follows the story of John Proctor, whose affair with his servant Abigail sets in motion a cycle of revenge and accusations of witchcraft, that will tear apart the fragile community with deadly consequences.

What the critics like

Arthur Miller's great play "has never mesmerised and moved me quite like Yael Farber's revival", says Dominic Maxwell in The Times. This historical masterpiece feels entirely present-tense, making us feel not so much that we are watching the play but that we are part of it.

Though once about McCarthyism, this superb play now seems to suggest the dangers of religious fundamentalism, says Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph. Here it "achieves the intensity of a thriller", with an exhilarating performance from Armitage, in a production of electrifying intensity.

Farber's extraordinary production "preserves the integrity of Miller's language while investing the action with a raw, visceral power", says Michael Billington in The Guardian. It's a tremendous production of a play that retains its disturbing relevance.

What they don't like

Critics are united in their praise for Farber's production, and though The Independent's Paul Taylor says The Crucible "unfolds with the sick dread of a horrible dream from which you are powerless to awake", he adds that it is nevertheless "unmissable".

For further concise, balanced comment and analysis on the week's news, try The Week magazine. Subscribe today and get 6 issues completely free.

Review Roundup: THE CRUCIBLE at Old Vic
July 5
12:07 PM 2014

by BWW News Desk
Review Roundup: THE CRUCIBLE at Old Vic

Yaël Farber directs a visceral re-imagining of Arthur Miller's modern American masterpiece, The Crucible, at Old Vic, which began previews on June 24. Miller used his play about the Salem witch trials to draw parallels with his experience of McCarthy's anti-communist investigations in the 1950's. The Crucible tells the story of one man's fight to save his identity in a repressive Puritan community where intolerance collides with lust and superstition, fueling widespread hysteria with tragic results.

In this production, Richard Armitage, Anna Madeley and Samantha Colley play John Proctor, Elizabeth Proctor and Abigail Williams.

Let's see what the critics had to say:

Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard: "Farber makes the play feel urgent and immediate - and does so by refusing to hurry. The action's wilful slowness is often exhilarating, and the performances pulse with bruising physicality...Although a running time of more than three and a half hours sounds daunting, The Crucible is an absorbing and ultimately devastating experience. It taxes the mind but also spears you in the guts."

Paul Taylor, Independent: "Farber's revival brings the nightmare madness home to us with an extraordinary physical intensity, a masterly feel for the different emotional rhythms in Miller's scenes and a tension that is brilliantly sustained over the show's three-and-a-half hours running time."

Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph: "In her thrilling production at the Old Vic, which lasts three and a half hours but never loosens its dramatic grip, the South African director Yaël Farber doesn't labour the point but trusts the audience to make its own connections with our own troubled times. The drama is staged with a mixture of simplicity and dramatic power that builds up an ominous feeling of dread and fear. As a result this harrowing play achieves the intensity of a thriller, as the girls under the malign spell of their ringleader Abigail Williams (a memorably sinister Samantha Colley), accuses countless decent people in the village of witchcraft. Only gradually does it become clear that Abigail has her own motives for revenge."

Dominic Maxwell, The Times: "I've seen Arthur Miller's great play many times before, but it has never mesmerised and moved me quite like Yaël Farber's revival manages to do here. This South African director won worldwide acclaim two years ago with Mies Julie, in which she relocated Strindberg's classic to her homeland in the present day. Here, she stays faithful to Miller's text and to his setting of the Salem witch trials in 1692 Massachusetts."

Michael Billington, Guardian: "Productions of Arthur Miller's re-creation of the Salem witch hunt tend to be as flinty and hard-edged as the author's prose. But the South African Yaël Farber, director of an acclaimed Mies Julie, has come up with an extraordinary production that preserves the integrity of Miller's language while investing the action with a raw, visceral power I've never witnessed."

Quentin Letts, Daily Mail: "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."

Michael Coveney, WhatsOnStage: "Yaël Farber's strident and mostly gripping production starts slowly and ritualistically... John Proctor, played with gallant good looks and some physical power by Richard Armitage... Tim Lutkin's lighting sculpts it in startling silhouette. But Armitage's hoarseness - he strains against his own vocal chords - becomes increasingly monotonous... Soon, everyone's shouting their heads off as if their lives depended on it; this proves a poor way of counter-balancing the rigid, almost hierarchical staging of the comings and goings through the circular arena, where some artful scene changes in Soutra Gilmour's design slow down the evening (well over three-and-a-half hours long) even more... It's a very strong evening, especially in the tragic renewal of the Proctors' marriage. But a lot of the noise is too hollow to hurt, too blustery to burn."

KatharineD Proves that The Crucible is the Most Acclaimed London Play in Five Years: http://armitageagonistes.wordpress.com/ ... ive-years/

The Witches of West End
Ingrid D. Rowland


Richard Armitrage as John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the Old Vic
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”:


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:


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



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



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.

Baz Bamigboye ‏@BazBam

London's having the best theatre season in years.Gripping plays @oldvictheatre @TrafTransformed @NationalTheatre @DonmarWarehouse all overLn