The incredible hunk casts his spell: QUENTIN LETTS reviews The Crucible at London's Old Vic

By Quentin Letts

Published: 22:48 GMT, 3 July 2014 | Updated: 22:56 GMT, 3 July 2014


The Crucible (Old Vic)
Verdict: 45 minutes too long


Rating: 3 Star Rating
Bewitching: Richard Armitage and Samantha Colley in Arthur Miller's tragedy of witch-hunting

Bewitching: Richard Armitage and Samantha Colley in Arthur Miller's tragedy of witch-hunting

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.

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.

The farmer regrets his one-night stand with young Abigail Williams (Samantha Colley). Though Abigail is the one alleging witchcraft, the real devilry stems from her (perhaps under-explored) greed for Proctor.

Miller was arguing that the real threat to American freedoms came not from Left-wingers but from the McCarthyites.

Miss Colley is suitably bewitching — her eyes blaze with astonishing zeal — and the Old Vic has assembled a rich cast that includes Christopher Godwin and Jack Ellis as judges, Michael Thomas as the slippery Reverend Parris, and hoary William Gaunt. Much shouting and shrieking ensues, much of it inaudible.

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.


At times, the show descends into overblown, shouty portentousness. When Abigail and her coven of friends start having fits, we could almost be in a bad episode of Dr Who — yet other moments are spellbinding.

Tim Lutkin’s lighting, Miller’s writing and the commitment of the cast to this cautionary story are admirable, and the second half, with its court scene, may serve as a warning to the suffocating absurdities of the legal profession.

Arthur Miller's play now looks like a cautionary tale about religious fundamentalism, says Charles Spencer - and this staging, starring Richard Armitage, is electrifying
5 out of 5 stars

Exhilarating: Richard Armitage in 'The Crucible' at the Old Vic
By Charles Spencer12:01AM BST 04 Jul 2014CommentsComment
Great plays can change their meaning with the passing of time and shifts in attitudes. When I was studying The Tempest as a student, it was viewed as Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre and a moving meditation on the possibility of hard-won forgiveness. These days, it is often regarded as a study of colonialism and racial exploitation.
Something similar has happened with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. His account of the 17th-century witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts was inspired by the paranoia about Communists whipped up by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
These days, however, this superb play strikes different notes. It now seems to be about the present danger of religious fundamentalism, and of the mindset of those who believe that they should kill in the name of God.
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.

The current in-the-round configuration of the Old Vic brings the audience excitingly close to the action as the witch-hunters prosecute the innocent villagers. It also creates the impression that we are in a crucible in which the characters are being boiled down to their essence. Richard Hammarton’s foreboding sound score, with its electronic growls and rumbles, ratchets up the tension like a horror movie.
There is nothing flashy about the staging, which has a stark simplicity. The director creates a feeling of night about the piece helped by Tim Lutkin’s shadowy lighting, conjuring the dread of a bad dream from which you can’t awake.
One of the strongest features of the production is the performances of the teenage girls who make the lurid allegations of witchcraft. They often speak in creepy unison, and screech and howl, shaking their long hair and writhing on the floor. There is an authentic edge of collective hysteria about them.
Richard Armitage, best known for TV dramas and The Hobbit movies, proves an exhilarating stage actor, with blazing eyes and a righteous fury about him, as well as manifest decency. His deep guilt about his brief affair with Abigail, who has become his nemesis, is powerfully caught. And his final reconciliation with his wife, beautifully played by Anna Madeley, who admits her own part in their troubles, proves extraordinarily intimate and moving.
Among the supporting cast, Jack Ellis delivers a sinister tour de force as the chief witch-hunter, Danforth, especially as he puts the frighteners on Natalie Gavin’s terrified Mary Warren as she desperately tries to tell the truth. And Adrian Schiller movingly captures the crisis of conscience of the Rev John Hale who realises a dreadful travesty of justice has been done.
But even the smallest roles come to full-blooded life in a production of electrifying intensity.

Die ist ja auch von der Daily Fail !

:daumen: Ich muss sagen, so herum ist es mir lieber.

The Times review
Dominic Maxwell

Rated to 5 stars

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.

Yet she makes us feel not so much that we are watching the play but that we are part of it. “A drama cannot merely describe an emotion,” Miller wrote in his autobiography, “it has to become that emotion.” And Farber makes palpable these settlers’ paranoia and power games but also the deprivation and repression from which they spring.

The Crucible starts at a fever pitch. Accusations fly as teenaged girls are accused of witchcraft. The audience sits on all sides of Soutra Gilmour’s spare, in-the-round set as black-clad characters speak testily in northern accents (American accents were yet to be invented). There are droning sounds, dim lighting, plenty of smoke. The mood is unrelenting, properly Puritan, initially rather testing. It’s grim up North America.

Yet after Richard Armitage’s gruff John Proctor has clashed with Samantha Colley’s scheming, spurned Abigail, his former servant and mistress, Farber’s production has done the heavy lifting it needs to do. It has made hysteria tangible. And from then on this Cruciblegets ever more intimate and intense and insinuating. Yes, it’s long, at three and a half hours. Yet Miller’s perfect plotting and some precise, physical acting draw us into a world where innocence is no defence, where the only way to defend yourself against the system is to join the system.

Miller was spurred to write this 1953 play as an allegory of the McCarthyite paranoia of the time. Yet as first Adrian Schiller’s punctilious Reverend Hale and then Jack Ellis’s casually invincible Judge Danforth prod for any signs of dissent — two entirely different but equally powerful performances, flecked with wit — this speaks volumes about any absolutist regime. There are no entirely good or entirely bad characters here; just people striving for status or survival.

Armitage leads with passion as Proctor: it’s big acting, but Farber gives him the context for it. His scenes with his wife (Anna Madeley) have a repressed passion whose eventual release is overwhelming. There is fine support too from Colley as Abigail; from Natalie Gavin as the Proctors’ maid, Mary, and William Gaunt as an endearing Giles Corey. The entire ensemble of 24 ensures that Miller’s historical masterpiece feels entirely present-tense. Box office: 0844 871 7628, to Sept 13. The production is sponsored by Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Und in sofern ein guter Auftakt, um sich zu steigern.