“Every aspect of Lyndsey Turner’s production of The Crucible is sensational.” Arthur Miller’s vilifying challenge to cultural despots resounds about the Gielgud theatre.
📍Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue
📅 Until 2nd September 2023
💷 From £20.00
🕖 7:00pm / 2.00pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 2 hours 50 minutes (one interval)
🖊️ Writer: Arthur Miller
🎬 Director: Lyndsey Turner
🪀 Designer: Es Devlin
🎵 Composer and Arranger: Caroline Shaw
🎵 Music Designer & Arranger: Osnat Schmool
💡 Lighting Designer: Tim Lutkin
🎶 Sound Designer (Content): Tingying Dong
🎶 Sound Designer (System): Christopher Shutt
🧵 Costume Designer: Catherine Fay
🎂 Contains strong language and themes which some may find distressing.
🎭 Captioned: 15th July 2pm, 31st July 7pm; Audio Described: 22nd July 2pm, 7th Aug 7pm; BSL 29 July 2pm
Few plays possess such immortal relevance to the human condition as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Inspired by the Salem witch trials which destroyed hundreds of lives in late 17th Century Massachusetts, it remains as salient to society’s condition as it was when opening seven decades ago.
However, it’s Es Devlin’s sheeting curtain of water which first arrests the audience at the National Theatre’s current revival. Bathing the audience in the soft roar of a captive rain-cloud and effervescent mist, the tone is set before the first utterance. It parts to reveal a sharply raked stage, painted in hues of black, rising to a remarkably distant horizon.
It’s a stark, and remarkable setting, apt to the drama about to unfold therein.
Miller opens proceedings in the attic of the town’s newest preacher, Samuel Parris (Nick Fletcher), where lies his child, Betty (Amy Snudden), seemingly catatonic. This her condition, since being discovered with her older, teenage ‘friend’ Abigail Williams (a viciously luminous Milly Alcock), several of the village girls and his Barbadian slave Tituba (Nadine Higgin) dancing naked in the woods. Desperate to avoid the deadly consequences should her attempted witchcraft be uncovered, Abigail sets about redistributing her crime with fatal consequences.
First on her ‘to-murder, list is Elizabeth Proctor (Caitlin FitzGerald), wife to John (Brian Gleeson), a position she covets. Once she has the other local adolescents bullied or charmed into line, this choir of supposed victims are free to accuse anyone, no matter their role or rank, and so place them in the shadow of the hangman’s noose. Their eerie song attends many of the play’s more calamitous developments, an overt, and cynical display of their saintliness.
Every aspect of Lyndsey Turner’s production of The Crucible is sensational. The cast, led by a spellbinding Gleeson breathe vivid life into every character. Caroline Shaw’s minimalist score slides along, a dark current lapping treacherous shores. TIm Lutkin’s lighting paints the stage with a restrained palette, and a deft weaving of shadows. Rain-curtain aside, Devlin keeps the props simple, conjuring chapel, homestead, courthouse, and prison with little more than chairs and a table. The play’s the thing here, and nothing is to stand between the audience and the weight of each word.
For all the gathering menace, Turner’s production never loses sight of the underlying absurdity, or the mundane humanity of the unfortunate citizens put to this needless test. Thomas Putnam (Alastair Parker) is continually claiming tracts of land his late father willed him, without ever owning; Irrascible old Giles Corey (Karl Jonhnson is just superb) claims damages for the least offence.
Demonstrating Miller’s dim view of humanity, many of the subsequent denunciations are rooted in these domestic quibbles. There’s less religion, and more prejudice laden score-settling fuelling these allegations of devil-worship. nce the state, embodied in Deputy Governor Danforth (Matthew Marsh) takes the reigns, the die is cast. Marsh cuts a formidable figure, self-assured to the point of tyranny, and ultimately unable to countenance the idea that the court has been suborned as the children’s pet executioner.
In contrast is the Reverend John Hale (a subtly powerful Fisayo Akinade), a renowned expert in witchcraft, summoned by Parris to assuage the townsfolk’s earliest fears of supernatural trouble. His is a remarkable, and sadly unusual journey, where reason ultimately reveals the true horror of his deeds. Nia Towle also excels as the youthful Mary Warren, also desperate to tell the truth and free her soul, but terrified of the price of dissent.
However, it’s in ensemble that this production reveals its full power, the dialogue waxing and waning, oft-times a tumult of competing currents, before one surges forth to capture a scene. There’s no showboating, no scenery chewing, just a razor sharp, committed delivery of the text. The audience feels the abstract combat between madness and reason, superstition and rationality. Each must ask themselves if they would embrace a monstrous lie, and perpetuate a heinous status quo on pain of catastrophic censure, or worse, execution.
From this struggle, more than one hero emerges, even as the grisly conclusion grinds nearer. However, it’s Gleeson’s iron-willed, flawed John Proctor who must ultimately voice Miller’s challenge to the witch hunters of every age. The dart aimed at the breast of one Joseph McCarthy, travels on, not lacing in new cultural despots to skewer. Gleeson’s punishing, thrilling performance speeds it on with renewed velocity.
Ultimately, for all that Miller takes some liberties with the historical record, there’s no doubting the fundamental truth at the heart of the play. Good people doing ‘something,’ he argues, isn’t always enough to prevent the triumph of evil. The truth, nevertheless, must be proclaimed, lest victim turn collaborator and become an engine of yet further, needless destruction. With social media making baseless, ill-informed, and life-ruining persecution easier than ever, it’s as urgent a message as ever. Resistance to mass delusion and misinformation is not futile, it is necessary.
The Crucible is a production of The National Theatre, in association with Playing Field and Annapurna Theatre.
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