I was surprised to learn that I hadn’t seen The Crucible before attending Tim Sheader’s Open Air Theatre production last week. Arthur Miller’s classic is so engrained into the collective consciousness that I had lazily assumed I must have done it for GCSE, or maybe even played a minor puritan in a school production, but memory definitively says otherwise and, seeing it for the first time, I was taken aback by how good it was.
A clever diagonal set, shaped like the silhouette of a house, disgorges furniture from the bowels via an array of hydraulic trap doors: a visual representation of the competing influences of heaven and hell running through the three hours. A chorus of cast members around the edges of the stage reacts in sinister unison as growing hysteria grips the small town and evening shadows steal across the bowl shaped arena.
Patrick O’Kane is a very moving John Proctor and it is easy enough to see why he would fall for Emily Taaffe’s bewitching Abigail whilst Oliver Ford Davies makes much more than a cameo of the relentless deputy governor unable to see past his own petty principles as he deals death to the innocent. It is tempting to draw parallels between the court and jailhouse scenes after the interval and newspaper columns about Guantanamo Bay but bigotry and injustice are universal failings. Period costumes and excellent dialect work place the play firmly in its own time in spite of the occasional interruption from passing planes. Come back cloud of volcanic ash: all is forgiven!
In the highly unlikely event that you are now the only person in the world who hasn’t actually seen the play then get down to Regent’s Park at 8pm one evening: you won’t be disappointed.
The Crucible
By Arthur Miller
Directed by Timothy Sheader
24 May – 19 June 2010
