No Rain, No Gain?: ‘The Crucible’ Review

★★★✰✰

The stage is cloaked in an oppressive darkness. Actors hover in from upstage like phantoms. A shivering portentous feeling pervades the Olivier stage throughout The Crucible. It’s not just the sense of the supernatural that lurks in this darkness. It’s the paranoia that proliferates through the New England community at the heart of the play.

But Lyndsey Turner doesn’t connect the dots. The Crucible is a worthwhile production, but it is never more than the sum of its parts.

That is not to say the play is bad. Far from it. Turner must be commended for keeping the audience on our toes. She drills down into individual psychologies of the play’s characters rather than the community wide tension; no doubt a well calculated attempt on the director’s part to resist didactic finger wagging, shirking an obvious ‘cancel culture’ interpretation.

It is not just the aesthetics of Lyndsey Turner’s production that are carefully crafted. The ambient soundscape lingers in the background slowly undulating to ramp up the terror. It underpins delicately an ensemble of powerful performances.

Emphasis on the word ‘ensemble’. No doubt there will be a lot of focus on The Crown’s Emma Corin as Abigail Williams (who is powerfully both juvenile and menacing) but she is propped up by a stalwart Brendan Cowell as John Proctor and affectionate Fisayo Akinade as Reverend Hale. The whole cast conjure a pervading creepiness that burrows beneath the skin. Each character is slowly infected by a tense rigidity that bubbles to a boiling point.

There are some neat directorial touches peppered in too to accentuate the atmosphere; we see fragments of Abigail Williams’ coterie conspiring in their ritual dances, dressed as if they have just come in from the Picnic at Hanging Rock as well as the authoritarian judges whispering silent condemnations in the background.

But for all its chic design The Crucible never finds the string to tie itself together. Perhaps the uneven pace is the culprit; sometimes the foot is on the exhaust and scenes play out like a raucous thriller too eager to explode with emotions. Sometimes it’s the opposite, and Miller’s swampy legal exchanges feel brackish rather than fluid despite the strong cast wading through.

It must also be noted that designer Es Devlin’s rainscape, plastered over the publicity, literally doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t seem to make a difference begs the question of its necessity. Yes, it looks cool. But does it help to tie the production together? Probably not.

Words by Alexander Cohen

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