A key requirement for any revival of The Crucible is that it “doesn’t feel too much like a lecture in disguise”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Famously, Arthur Miller wrote his 1953 play – about the “juvenile-led spasm of denunciation and execution” that seized Salem, Massachusetts in 1692-3 – as a “chilling quasiallegory” for McCarthyite anticommunism.
Lyndsey Turner’s “gripping” production “magnificently” passes that test – providing drama without didacticism. And even if the director doesn’t quite “reinvent” the piece, she thoroughly “refreshes it, honouring the specificity but banishing clutter”, and creating an “awe-inspiring monumentalism”. This is “the National at its best”.
It’s a “masterly” production, agreed Theo Bosanquet on What’s on Stage – brilliantly paced, and so “visually sumptuous” it’s “like watching a live oil painting”. The performances, too, are top-notch. Brendan Cowell puts an earthy spin on the role of John Proctor, playing him as a “farmer with his feet firmly in the soil. You believe he could plough for hours on a Sunday”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
As Abigail, Proctor’s vengeful teenage lover, Erin Doherty (the young Princess Anne in The Crown) is “skittish, frenzied and deeply malevolent” – and when she and the other girls “perform their wild hallucinations, it feels genuinely frightening”.
Turner’s production is “full of good ideas and atmospheric flourishes”, said Andrzej Lukowski on Time Out. Designer Es Devlin has created a spectacular “crashing wall of artificial rain that shrouds” the vast Olivier stage before every scene: combined with Tim Lutkin’s “exquisitely moody lighting, and the a cappella singing from the pink-clad chorus of girls”, this elemental cascade is spine-tingling. Yet for all the good ideas and fleet staging, it doesn’t amount to an “entirely coherent reinvention”.
This revival is certainly “handsomely raised”, but it is also rather on the “safe” side, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. What lingers in our minds afterwards is not so much the meat of Miller’s great drama, but the production’s “polished aesthetics”.
Olivier, National Theatre, London SE1. Until 5 November
-
Political cartoons for November 9Cartoons Sunday’s political cartoons include a ripoff, and the land of opportunity
-
A ‘golden age’ of nuclear powerThe Explainer The government is promising to ‘fire up nuclear power’. Why, and how?
-
Massacre in Darfur: the world looked the other wayTalking Point Atrocities in El Fasher follow decades of repression of Sudan’s black African population
-
6 homes with fall foliagefeature An autumnal orange Craftsman, a renovated Greek Revival church and an estate with an orchard
-
Bugonia: ‘deranged, extreme and explosively enjoyable’Talking Point Yorgos Lanthimos’ film stars Emma Stone as a CEO who is kidnapped and accused of being an alien
-
The Revolutionists: a ‘superb and monumental’ bookThe Week Recommends Jason Burke ‘epic’ account of the plane hijackings and kidnappings carried out by extremists in the 1970s
-
Film reviews: ‘Bugonia,’ ‘The Mastermind’ and ‘Nouvelle Vague’feature A kidnapped CEO might only appear to be human, an amateurish art heist goes sideways, and Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’ gets a lively homage
-
Book reviews: ‘Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity’ and ‘Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice’feature An examination of humanity in the face of “the Machine” and a posthumous memoir from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, who recently died by suicide
-
The dazzling coral gardens of Raja AmpatThe Week Recommends Region of Indonesia is home to perhaps the planet’s most photogenic archipelago
-
Salted caramel and chocolate tart recipeThe Week Recommends Delicious dessert can be made with any biscuits you fancy
-
6 trailside homes for hikersFeature Featuring a roof deck with skyline views in California and a home with access to private trails in Montana
