The Crucible at Shakespeare’s Globe – review

Most venues programming a revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, heralded as one of the greatest plays ever written, would be accused of placing a fairly safe bet.

In the vast wooden-O at Shakespeare’s Globe however, it’s something of a departure – a 20th century classic presented on a stage normally reserved either for the Bard and his contemporaries or for short runs of new writing. Thankfully, venue and material are, unlike the play’s central protagonists, beautifully wedded.

It starts slowly, as The Crucible always does. Miller fastidiously maps out the backdrop of Salem on the eve of witch trial chaos – petty disputes over timber or land ownership are neatly nestled in a powder keg that takes a spark of religious hysteria to detonate.

Director Ola Ince injects very few bells or whistles into proceedings, with the result much less stylised than the brooding, rain-soaked National Theatre revival seen a few years back. On the vast Globe stage, extended even further in Amelia Jane Hankin’s set design, Salem seems to almost unspool into the auditorium – townspeople bustle through the groundlings and carts filled with the condemned are wheeled through the crowd. There’s a rich vein of authenticity to it all.

One small flourish from Ince is a moment where the initial accusers – the young Abigail Williams and her close friends – jubilantly scream and cheer together after their alibi for illicit dancing in the woods holds water. In that moment, we see an excitable group of children unwittingly setting off a tragic sequence of events: think Yellowjackets with more crucifixes and fewer cannibals.

The majority of the large ensemble cast tap into the strong current of naturalism – from the surprisingly understated yet deeply morally ambiguous Gavin Drea as John Proctor (is he a villain? Arguably yes, Ince suggests), to Jo Stone-Fewings’ Reverend Hale, who wilts like spinach on a stove as his convictions are torn apart by the mishandling of the trials and the subsequent executions.

Phoebe Pryce finds the quiet tragedy in Elizabeth Proctor, willing to openly confront her husband over his infidelity with a teenager, while Hannah Saxby’s Abigail veers quite astutely between being the victim of an older man’s lust and a calculating woman trying to capitalise on the circumstances she faces. The only performer to truly buck the trend (and in the process liven up his two scenes) is Gareth Snook’s officious Danforth – taking pomposity to new levels of extravagance.

Sometimes a director should be commended for their restraint as much as for their bold interventions. Ince lets Miller’s text do the heavy lifting, with a blistering courtroom scene gripping in all the right ways, while the noble demise of John Proctor is suitably climactic.

With random villagers milling in wings or watching from the yard, this play feels less like an individual tragedy and more of a communal one – where misplaced morality and individual greed burn through the fabric of a fragile society.