The Crucible
Published Friday 4 July 2014 at 09:59 by Heather Neill
Arthur Miller’s 1950s forensic, passionate examination of personal and public morality still resonates. After All My Sons in Regent’s Park and Ivo van Hove’s stunning, stripped-back A View from the Bridge at the Young Vic, Yael Farber, best known for her racially, sexually potent version of Ibsen, Mies Julie, tackles the famous witchcraft metaphor for McCarthyism.
Richard Armitage and Anna Madeley in The Crucible, at the Old Vic
Richard Armitage and Anna Madeley in The Crucible, at the Old Vic
Photo: Tristram Kenton
In 1965, when Olivier directed the play at this same theatre, Miller hoped that it had already been freed from such specificity. It is up-to-date wherever fear causes a reduction of freedom, wherever tyranny rules. Farber brings out its continued relevance with gutsy vigour, and Richard Armitage (a theatre actor before Hobbit fame) relishes mining the depths of John Proctor, a flawed but decent man, who chooses to die rather than accept a prevailing lie.
Anna Madeley, pinched and pale as his dignified wife, and Samantha Colley as wildly vengeful Abigail head the rest of an excellent cast, with veteran William Gaunt especially touching as Giles Corey.
Soutra Gilmour’s enveloping design obscures every scrap of gilt with grey drapes, Tim Lutkin’s lighting paints interiors, while Richard Hammarton’s soundscape suggests heartbeats and raw nerve-ends.
The in-the-round setting has the advantage of implicating us all, but in the first half scene changes are awkward without a blackout. The emotional temperature rises to a stunning crescendo, however, with the hysterical girls moving together like a vicious cloud and flinging their hair in abandon as the innocent are hanged and the righteous bully victims into false confession. The final reconciliation of the Proctors is unforgettable.

Production information
Old Vic Theatre, June 21-September 13, PN July 3
Author:
Arthur Miller
Director:
Yael Farber
Design:
Soutra Gilmour (designer), Tim Lutkin (lighting designer), Richard Hammarton (music/sound)
Technical:
Imogen Knight (movement), Camilla Evans, Maggie Lunn (casting), Michaela Kennen (voice/dialect coach), Mark Maughan (assistant director), Kev McCurdy (fight director), Dominic Fraser (production manager), Graham Michael (company stage manager), Alex Burke (deputy stage manager), Georgia Pavelkova (assistant stage manager)
Cast includes:
Richard Armitage, Anna Madeley, Samantha Colley, Adrian Schiller, Natalie Gavin, Michael Thomas, Jack Ellis, William Gaunt, Sarah Niles
Producer:
Old Vic Productions
Running time:
3hrs 30mins

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The Crucible (Old Vic)
Richard Armitage leads the cast of Yaël Farber's timely revival
By Michael Coveney • 4 Jul 2014 • London, West End
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'Gallant good looks and some physical power' - Richard Armitage plays John Proctor
'Gallant good looks and some physical power' - Richard Armitage as John Proctor
© Johan Persson
Since the last London production of The Crucible, Arthur Miller's searing indictment of the witch hunt mentality posing as moral righteousness, we've had plenty of local examples of this recurring human phenomenon, proving the strength of Miller's allegorical drama written at the height of the "reds under the bed" scare in America.
The Crucible, one of the key social plays of the last century, is ostensibly about the trials and convictions in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. A community is knocked sideways by rumours of girls dancing naked in the woods, murdered babies, "enemies in the dark," and even puppets stuffed with needles, one of which is produced as evidence in court.
In the new in-the-round configuration at the Old Vic, Yaël Farber's strident and mostly gripping production starts slowly and ritualistically, with the Barbadian slave Tituba (Sarah Niles) carrying a smoking bowl while the new reverend's daughter lies in a trance on her bed.
The girls, led by the devious and scheming Abigail Williams (Samantha Colley), are a crypto-coven of sullen adolescents, swishing their long hair in fake ecstasy like a mini-Pina Bausch troupe, trapped in a baseless hysteria fuelled by a few black magic parties.
So far so frightening. Abigail's got her teeth into the honest farmer John Proctor, played with gallant good looks and some physical power by Richard Armitage. A moment of historic weakness allows her to exploit John's adultery to frame Elizabeth (a strikingly stoical Anna Madeley).
The Crucible

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The magnificent second act where this situation develops like a canker against a backdrop of rising hysteria, knocks on the door and news of arrests, focuses on the Proctors at their kitchen table, an intimate study of the distance between them.
"You have a faulty understanding of young girls," says Elizabeth. John, who moves towards his own salvation by acknowledging his failures as a man, has to explain why he doesn't go to church; he doesn't like the new priest Paris (Michael Thomas) who's replaced the old pewter candles with gold ones; and he sometimes ploughs a field on a Sunday, another nail in his coffin. "Is the accuser always holy now?"
Armitage and Madeley play this scene beautifully, and Tim Lutkin's lighting sculpts it in startling silhouette. But Armitage's hoarseness - he strains against his own vocal chords - becomes increasingly monotonous as the noose tightens, and the Deputy Governor Danforth, whom Jack Ellis presents as a pantomime villain in jackboots and melodramatic gestures, starts turning up the volume to the extent of blotting out his own arguments.
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.
The act of self-sacrifice in the Salem prison is more temperately done - until we get to the signature scene which suddenly flares and becomes unwatchable - with Adrian Schiller's transformed John Hale, draped in sack-cloth and ashes, and Ann Firbank's wise and tiny Rebecca Nurse (the alleged baby-killer) shining on the side-lines. 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.

Three-and-a-half-hours engulf your soul like a black mass in this titanic, ritualistic production of Arthur Miller’s allegorical tragedy about the Salem witch trials from hot property South African director Yael Farber. And yes, that is one heck of a running time, partly due to a clutch of wordless movement sequences Farber has inserted into the in-the-round production, most notably the audacious opening in which the entire, black-clad cast shuffle about the stage in a fug of incense like some apocalyptic rite (kudos to movement director Imogen Knight).

For the most part, Farber does nothing more revolutionary than give Miller’s text the amount of space it needs: there’s no sense of time wasted, it’s more that every word has been considered and given its due weight, and there is a harshly beautiful ebb and flow to everything, a sense that the doom of this small Massachusetts town is closing in like clockwork. The speaking – in harsh Yorkshire accents – is painful, blunt and clear, Richard Hammarton’s unsettling string and drone-based score punctuates it perfectly, Tim Lutkin’s monochrome lights add to the feel of unforgiving Old Testament reality. Everything else is pared away – there’s austere period costume, but no set to speak of. This is a granite hard, precision cut, intensely atmospheric production that transcends the original context of the play – an allegory for McCarthyism – expanding it into a weighty examination of the human capacity for irrational hatred.

At the centre stands Richard Armitage’s John Proctor, a hard man in a hard world. Casting the sexy dwarf from ‘The Hobbit’ was always going to get a few bums on seats, but his flinty handsomeness and sheer, rugged presence is key: he is an unstoppable force, a driven, determined man colliding with the immovable object of the Salem community, stirred up to murderous hysteria by a combination of petty grievance, superstitious nonsense, an unaccountable judiciary and a refusal to believe that the group of young girls naming townsfolk as witches may be lying. The scenes of courtroom clash are truly astonishing, every utterance by Armitage and witch finder in chief Judge Hathorne (Christopher Godwin) like a precision avalanche. And when the girls are called before the judge, their mock possession is truly frightening – the piquancy of horror is never far from the mix. And the gradual, painful thawing of relations between Proctor and his wife Elizabeth (Anna Madeley) is just devastating.

It is operatic, it is immense, it is – after the Young Vic’s ‘A View from the Bridge’ – the second definitive Miller production London has seen this year: the lengthy first half flew by, and yet I was grateful for an interval just to steady myself; by the end I was pretty much broken.

By Andrzej Lukowski

Review by Mark Shenton
04 Jul 2014

From Bristol Old Vic to London's Old Vic: it is almost exactly 60 years since Arthur Miller's The Crucible received its British premiere at the Bristol Old Vic in November 1954, after opening on Broadway the year before, and now it is back at London's Old Vic. The play has long become one of those dogged staples of the repertoire and a school set text that's difficult to see through fresh eyes.

But that is precisely what the South African director Yaël Farber has brought to this brilliant and bracing new production. She's a director who first burst upon British consciousness in 2012 with her stunningly physical and ferocious production of Strindberg's Miss Julie, relocated to contemporary South Africa and re-titled Mies Julie, that got five-star raves at the Edinburgh Fringe, then came to London's Riverside Studios.

Now she applies the same kind of brooding intensity and intimacy to a much bigger play, with its cast of 24 actors magnificently marshalled onto the platform that stands at the centre of this in-the-round configuration of the theatre that has been re-installed there this year, and proves a particular benefit for this play and production.

It turns the audience into inquisitors as well as jury, and brings the play and its players into much closer contact with us. If there are occasions when the exaggerated passions of the young girls who, accused of witchcraft, start implicating adults in their story threaten to overwhelm, the underlying sense of hysteria is otherwise very precisely maintained, and more importantly so is the heartbreaking tenderness of the story of one of the couples affected, John Proctor (Richard Armitage, returning to the stage for the first time in 12 years after screen work in Spooks and the Hobbit) and his wife Elizabeth (Anna Madeley).

Farber beds the play in with lots of physical business which is sometimes distracting, but she builds and maintains tension with a shattering intensity. There are likewise moments when some of the performances threaten to become overwrought, but this seems to be part of Farber's directorial scheme to keep the passions running high, so I won't single out the actors who would appear to be indulging themselves.

This has already been an amazing year for Arthur Miller in The Cut, with A View from the Bridge revived down the road at the Young Vic with real astonishment. Now the Old Vic has another hit on its hands. It's a long evening - it runs for three-and-a-half hours - but a very rewarding one.

(Mark Shenton)

THE CRUCIBLE – Old Vic, SE1


THE GATES OF HELL CREAK OPEN…



It will haunt the memory for months, this profound, dark-lit, smoke-scented deep-booming production of Arthur Miller’s play. In the round arena it creates a ring of pity, guilt and judgement: the physically intense direction of Yael Farber makes Salem’s crazy diabolic terror rise again, as fresh as yesterday and as threatening as tomorrow. No need for updating: not in a world where women are murdered by their own families for marrying or converting, confessions are beaten out of suspects and even our milder law sees malicious denunciation, false memory, and a lust for scapegoats.



Miller wrote that when he approached the idea of expressing 1950’s McCarthyism through the 17c Salem witch trials, the “story’s lines of force were still tangled”. But that very tangling enriches the play. John Proctor (Richard Armitage in a commanding performance) has slept with the maid Abigail; when her hysterical accusations threaten his wife Elizabeth with the gallows, he fights with desperate self-reproach, and only through final degradation walks upright into dawn and death. That private tragedy, and the pair’s progress from delicate marital adjustment to terror, are given breathless intensity by Armitage and a fine-drawn Anna Madeley as his wife. But the wider tangle matters as much. Complex political, social and psychological subtleties jab at the sorest places in any society.



The action is driven by the religious witch-hunt, spreading beyond the village’s control: Christopher Godwin makes Judge Hathorne a striking-cobra of a man. But Miller underpins the ludicrous fanaticism about dolls and visions with hints of the small things that corrode communities: rows about pigs or lumber, poor crops and infant mortality feeding an instinct to purge and control which ends with orphans wandering the streets, cattle loose, crops rotting. Hard not to think of the Balkans.



The speed with which Miller plunges into tension is remarkable. After a sinister opening moment when in near-darkness the slave Tituba circles the stage with a smoking cauldron: soup or diabolic incense, depending on credulity. Then we are in the bedroom with Betty in a swoon, the other girls turning their evasive schoolgirl guilt into infectious hysteria, and the suspicion of witchcraft rapidly inflated by Rev.Hale, the pompous theological terrier with books where the very devil is “caught, defined, calculated”. Adrian Schiller as Hale is particularly impressive even in a cast as strong as this, his gradual loss of face and conviction dwindling him to remorse and horror before our eyes.



But the strength of this majestic, perfectly judged production lies in faithful perspective and contrast. After the first hysteria the Proctors in their kitchen provide a glimpse of sane, if uneasy, normality as they reach towards one another, trying without words to forget the adultery, laying the foundation of the heartrending closeness of their final prison moments. As for the ‘children’, girls led by the jilted Abigail in jerking, shouting, hair-tossing accusatory seizures, they display all the bodily ferocity which is this director’s trademark: somewhere between St Trinian’s and Bacchantes. Abigail is Samantha Colley: all glaring black-browed control, her decision to deploy her only weapon visibly growing from the moment she is rejected by her lover after a yearning “I have a sense for heat, John! you are no wintry man…” This ticking bomb is finally detonated by the fussy reproofs of the clerics, but Farber allows us brief levity as male horror at Betty’s faint is set against the calm of Goody Nurse (“She’ll wake when she’s tired of it!”). In this small but pivotal part Ann Firbank is unforgettable, a small pool of sanity amid the chaos.



Soutra Gilmour’s design is a masterpiece of smoky atmosphere, and Richard Hammarton’s soundscape cracks open Hell itself. But above all the beauty of Miller’s lines is relished, explored, set like jewels. “An everlasting funeral marches around your heart..” ”I have signed seventy-two death warrants, my hand shakes still, as with a wound”. Or the final admission of Proctor that he finds in himself “a shred of goodness. Not enough to weave a banner with”. But do weave one for this unstinting, profound production. It does honour both to Miller and to the Old Vic.