Ola Ince’s recent productions for the Globe include a gritty police procedural Othello and a modern dress Romeo and Juliet that was so progressive it made the front page of The Sun (‘Wokeo and Juliet’, the headline screamed).
It’s therefore somewhat surprising that – aesthetically speaking – hers is by far the most trad take on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible I’ve ever seen: full-on period pilgrim garb from designer Amelia Jane Hankin, including a magnificent array of funny little conical hats.
But after a little while adjusting to the production’s rhythms it becomes apparent that Ince has done something quite distinctive with The Crucible: she’s directed it like an episode of The Archers.
By that I mean she’s tuned down the bombast and supernatural elements and essentially played it as a naturalistic drama about the eccentric, bickering inhabitants of Salem, Massachusetts.
This is carried off surprisingly smoothly, at least at first. Aside from the fact Miller wrote some genuinely funny village oddball characters (most notably the hyper litigious Giles Corey), it’s important to remember that The Crucible starts off small. As the play begins, some local girls have been reported as dancing in the woods, and one of them – Betty Parris – seems to have fallen ill. Another of them, Hannah Saxby’s Abigail Williams, has been having an affair with brooding local farmer John Procter (Gavin Drea) – they’re still affectionate when they briefly meet at the beginning, though he insists it has to stop. There are various petty local tensions to do with land ownership. So far, so Ambridge.
It’s only when Betty’s uptight preacher dad Reverend Parris (Steven Furst on magnificently obnoxious form) decides to look into the accusations of witchcraft that the girls have thrown out to cover their arses when matters start to tick out of control. First Jo Stone-Fewings’s upright Reverend Hale is called in to look into the substance of the accusations. Then people start getting arrested. Then Garth Snook’s florid, self-regarding Danforth is called in to preside over their trials. Then they start dying.
Gavin Drea’s John Procter is not the villain, but he’s not the hero either
Although The Crucible is very famously an allegory for McCarthyism and the Red Scare, it can be easy to forget that it’s also a meticulously researched drama about a thing that really happened. The Salem witch trials were real, and Miller’s characters were all taken from contemporary records – of course he brought an enormous amount of artistic license to bear (the records are mostly just things like names, ages and outcomes of court cases). But where many productions of this play are heightened far beyond any sort of naturalism, Ince here asks ‘how might this have actually played out?’
And it’s a familiar and yet different take. Certainly in imagining how it might have ‘actually’ happened, it feels of a piece with increasing unease at portraying the adulterous middle aged Procter as a tragic hero brought down by a scheming teenage girl (a shift in attitude embodied by Kimberley Belflower’s current Broadway hit John Procter is the Villain). Drea’s Procter is not the villain, but he’s not the hero either. Locked in a state of permanent, bitter brooding, Drea’s Proctor lights up only when he first encounters Abigail and otherwise drifts guiltily to his end. He doesn’t take a monumental stand for truth, but rather scrabbles around to protect his entirely innocent wife Elizabeth (Phoebe Pryce) from Abigail’s accusations.
In general, it works pretty well. But the fact of the matter is that The Crucible actually is bombastic, and in the final furlong Ince’s production suffers from underplaying events. There is relatively little sense of the tone of the village changing as the deaths start to stack up. The imminent execution of elderly pillar of the community Rebecca Nurse (Joanne Howarth) feels as downplayed as Procter’s trial, and the sense that he makes his final decision out of guilt rather than principle means it ends on a distinctly lower key than usual.
Ince is very good on how The Crucible starts small, but the trade off is she struggles when it gets big. Towards the end when virtually the entire community is willing one of Procter or Nurse to admit to witchcraft and provide an off ramp for the killings, there’s not the usual sense of a freight train out of control – it kind of feels like the trials could be called off and everyone would actually be fine with it.
It’s a valid and interesting take that both gains and loses from toning things down. And even reined in, it looks pretty spectacular under the darkening London skies – it’s the first American tragedy ever staged at the Globe, and it shouldn’t be the last.
