Films showing this Silver Cinema season:

Event Cinema

The Old Vic’s The Crucible starring Richard Armitage - 25th June

We are excited to announce that we will be screening a special performance of ‘The Old Vic’s - The Crucible’ for our ODEON Silver Cinema guests on the 25th June at 2pm.

Having previously been shown as ODEON Event cinema we have reduced the price for this encore performance to £6.50* . The performance will last approx 3 hours 38 minutes with a short interval in between where guests will have the opportunity to get further tea, coffee and biscuits.

Showing at selected sites only.

*Price applies to tickets for ODEON Silver Cinema special screenings of 'The Crucible' on Thursday 25th June with standard seats. Additional upgrade costs apply to other seats. Only at participating Cinemas.

... Close study evokes a sense of the artist as a whole. This could be the remarkably drilled and deftly executed poignant human dynamics of Maria Friedman's work or Jonathan Kent’s total theatrical vision – a director who works like a Renaissance portrait artist, worlds so beautifully realised in The Faerie Queen or Private Lives or in the live London theatre scene through Imelda Staunton’s towering performance in Gypsy, a performance so achieved and complete, it seems hewn from some ancient theatrical rock. More recently it’s been a close encounter with Richard Eyre’s meticulous humanity, again and again so beautifully revealed in Ghosts, and Yaël Farber’s immersive deep-souled plunge into the depths of character and environment in her acclaimed production of The Crucible. ...

Richard Armitage@RCArmitage

.@yfarber #TheCrucibleOnScreen from @DigitalTheatre @oldvictheatre hits Moscow ” So proud our work has reached so far.

Director's Cut: The Crucible
Posted: 15 Oct 2015

Choreographer Imogen Knight reveals her methods working on The Crucible

Working with Yaël Farber was an incredibly intense and visceral experience. It’s something I believe I was searching for and it has remained with me.

Yaël has a definite vision and process. There was a clear palette to work from and when I have this, I feel that creative energy, thoughts, and ideas are explored to their best and the work you create has its very own muscle. There is vigour through economy, because everyone involved is on the same trajectory. I believe that this is when work manages to really sing out - when it’s developed in a way that’s process-led and has a strong sense of identity.

I worked with the actors at the start of every morning and often at the start of every afternoon. Yaël and I wanted the actors to be in a particular place, both physically and emotionally, to start the work. This meant a vigorous and concentrated start to each day, which went right through rehearsals and continued into how they prepared for each performance throughout the run.

The group of actors covered a wide age range, meaning it was necessary to find a way for them to all work together physically that involved and suited everyone. As a group we developed an intense physical language and at times took a shamanistic approach to all aspects of the work, which challenged and encouraged the group to connect both to each other and to their own bodies.

There’s no ‘one size fits all’ formula; it’s about the group or individual you have in front of you, so I have varying processes for each project. For this particular company there needed to be a strong and fierce ensemble, and that means having a dedicated approach to how the physical and emotional chemistry works in the rehearsal room. This essential chemistry doesn’t come easily and takes consideration, but you know when you have it and something starts to cook.

Yaël and I liked to work with the young female actors on Friday evenings, when the light in the room was fading and the actors were a heady mixture of exhausted and energised. We found these sessions hugely transformative with regards to the emotional and physical quality of the possession and witchcraft scenes. The possession scenes were intricately choreographed, whilst at the same time needing to be alive and explosive - all within the emotional and rhythmic framework written by Miller.

My research for this production was predominately through art and music, where I usually find the most inspiration for my work. I envelop myself within it, so that I’m working from a very specific palette. I thrive most when I’m not distracted by anything that’s external to the work I’m involved in. I listened a lot to Doudou Ndiaye Rose, Yasmin Levy, Kronos Quartet (Floodplain), Lhasa de Sela, and looked at the work of Kathe Kollwitz and Goya.

Working with Yaël Farber and the whole team on this production was hugely transformative and as an artist, I feel fortunate to have been part of it.


By Imogen Knight

Digital Theatre ‏@DigitalTheatre

New cinema screenings added for #privatelives and #thecrucibleonscreen @barbican - visit http://barbican.org.uk

Richard Armitage@RCArmitage

Richard Armitage hat Digital Theatre retweetet

Hope you had a good #LoveTheatreDay

Richard Armitage hinzugefügt,
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Digital Theatre @DigitalTheatre
One last kiss for Elizabeth and John Proctor #RichardArmitage @AnnaMadeley #LoveTheatreDay #TheCrucibleonScreen

Verzeiht mir bitte die Doublette - ich konnte bei a tweet the day ... einfach nicht widerstehen.

In #DirectorsCut #ArthurMiller biographer Christopher Bigsby talks naming names in #thecrucibleonscreen @RCArmitage http://bit.ly/1SLx34n

Möglicherweise bin ich im falschen Thread - sorry - , aber ich wusste nicht, wo ich das kleine, nette Fundstück sonst unterbringen soll:

http://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/reise ... aeume.html

Director's Cut: Sound Design in The Crucible



Sound Designer Richard Hammarton delves into the mysterious sounds of Yaël Farber’s adaptation of The Crucible.

The first time I met Yaël she played me a long, 30-minute piece of drone-based music, which she heard as being the heartbeat of The Crucible. There was a hypnotic element to that drone that felt hugely suited to imagining a village caught up in something approaching group paranoia or hysteria - for me that was my starting point. Yaël was also keen on there being a human element to the music, something that felt raw, naked, and vulnerable, yet also powerful and potentially overwhelming.

The obvious choice seemed to be to use the human voice, but the challenge was to find a way of presenting it that didn’t feel contrived, or like something we’d heard before. I’d studied throat singing a little whilst at university and it felt like a good fit, so I got in contact with two singers called Candida and Michael. I recorded a library of different pitches, styles and effects with them and then noticed that they also had a huge gong in the room. When I asked them to demonstrate what it was capable of, Michael rubbed around the edge of the gong with a rubber beater - the sound in the room was extraordinary and seemed to vibrate right through your body. This gong became the bass end of the score for the show, its tonal quality seeming to resonate perfectly, especially when played loudly. It even held up to being pitch shifted around, so that I could use it as a bass instrument rather than as a single drone.

By this point the sound of the score was coming together: a gong-based drone with various electronics filtered over the top of it and layered with the throat singing. I felt that there needed to be some pure elements in there as well, that could try and hold their own against the darkness. These would hopefully give a sense of the freedom that could be experienced and the hope that it wouldn’t be extinguished. I used some heavily edited pure female vocals high up above the drone to contrast with the throat singing, repeating a phrase that felt as if it was always in danger of being cut off.

To add some melodic elements, I used a yayli tambur - a kind of bowed lute that vaguely resembles a cello when played and a traditional violin. The yayli was used to play a recurring six note phrase that, whilst beautiful, was also stuck in the circular, never ending world of the drone, whilst the violin was employed to play freer, folk-like phrases high up above. In a way these two instruments were having their own battle between freedom and darkness, in the same way that the drone was split between a heavy dark bass and voices that tried to penetrate through.

We were into previews and three or four shows along, when a post-show drink with Yaël gave me a bit of a wobble. She realised that there was something missing from the score, something that gave the human frailty but with a huge amount of power and she was absolutely right. To be honest I was stuck, I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what the missing element should sound like. So I took myself off, outside the Cut Bar and sat down on the pavement to think. In the absence of any clear idea I started to hum phrases into my iPhone, trying to add a growl to my voice and some breath at the beginning and end of the phrases, with the hope that they would lend a sense of power, but also a kind of weariness. Fortunately once back in the studio one of these phrases turned out to supply what we were looking for and became almost the most featured element of the soundtrack.

There were a multitude of other elements that I incorporated - the sound of distant metal clinking (a reference to an installation in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, consisting of thousands of metal ‘faces’ that can be walked over), cathedral ambiences played through 25 second reverbs, scraped metals, flautando violins, etc. All of these were designed to suggest a huge scale world surrounding the cast, but one into which they were seemingly unable to break, trapped as they were in their own insular realm.

There was also considerable use of underscore throughout the play, the first Act being continuously underpinned, with the exception of maybe three minutes or so. Yaël had mentioned that Miller referred to Act 1 as an overture, so we tried to maintain the tension throughout, only allowing it to relax at the start of Act 2.

Working on The Crucible was one of the greatest experiences of my theatrical life, there have been only one or two other shows that have come close to the all consuming nature of this production. Often when composing or sound designing for theatre, we’re only involved with the cast towards the end of the process and, as such, what we produce can feel (if only personally) somewhat of an add-on, rather than being embedded within the piece. With The Crucible I was involved from day one of rehearsals and then increasingly as we went through towards tech week. This led to a level of bonding between what I was writing and what the actors were doing in rehearsal that I’ve not known to happen on many other occasions.

The whole process of creating the show was intense but also hugely rewarding. Yaël is incredibly talented and has an absolute intent to keep striving to produce better more truthful work - there is never a point at which “ok” will suffice. I remember her quoting Miller in a pre-show talk to the cast one evening, shortly before I went off to sing on the pavement:

“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”

That has stuck with me and will remain as one of the guiding principles for the rest of my career.



By Richard Hammarton.

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