FringeReview UK 2025

The Crucible

Shakespeare’s Globe

Genre: classical, Drama, Historical, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre, Tragedy

Venue: Shakespeare’s Globe

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

There’s been Shakespeare, his contemporaries or newly-commissioned plays but never a modern classic at the Globe’s main stage. Miller’s 1953 The Crucible is now directed there till July12th by Ola Ince, returning after her magnificent Othello at the Sam Wanamaker in 2024.

The Crucible is a perfect fit: wooden houses, the late 17^th century Massachusetts setting finds something special here. The Salem witch  trials seem less alien, more disturbingly present. Amelia Jane Hankin’s memorable re-imagining of this space uses the Globe’s gallery and extended frontage.  There’s stairways and in the trial scene platforms for lawyers stuck out in the courtyard, with trundling carts of the condemned through groundlings. It helps the ominous percussion-led composition by Renell Shaw also provides a few songs or chants at heightened moments. Just these. Nothing more is needed in this three-hour traffic.

It’s a very different experience from the National Theatre production with its fabulous choirs and writhing in curtains of rain. In fact it had only stopped raining and massed choirs of helicopters were eventually banished.

Ince with Hankin’s set allows both stage and positioning of villagers to speak the wooden O which becomes almost a frontier palisade, with sniping from beyond. The pitch and toss of survival, a 40-year-old settlement, the continual struggle against cold and covetous land disputes (themselves thefts) is allowed to soak in, with Ince’s patient drawing-out. That’s particularly in the layering and twists of the second and third acts. And Ince’s refusal to over-dramatize the wildfire opening with its improvisatory disasters, and ratcheting close. Actors’ wails are the more piercing for that.

“We live in a sharp time, a precise time” pronounces Deputy Governor Danforth later. He’s registering how new science with its measuring is encroaching on how religion and Danforth’s superstition operate: with no lassitude either way. But he’s also registering the fragility both of the colonial settlement and its temporary usurpation of powers from the English after the 1688 ‘Glorious‘ Revolution. Which as Miller points out, allows local mutations of justice and the catastrophe of Salem.

Audible gasps and bursts of laughter show a fresh (as well as Globe-inflected) audience both unfamiliar with the play; or in some cases Ince’s emphases. It’s a production alive with possibility and detail.

The most striking is to allow Gavin Drea’s John Proctor his nobility, even heroism and warmth, indeed love for his “cold wife” Phoebe Pryce’s measured but warm Elizabeth Proctor, here given both restraint and final release in an extraordinarily moving final embrace. “Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer” seems valid when Drea says it, but Pryce movingly shows low self-esteem is at the root of much of her sexual coldness, and when this is melted, we see a tragically late transformation and renewal of love between the couple. Drea hre is quick and sharp-witted, a dominant townsman tragically outfoxed by scheming, but though compromised, ultimately heroic. There’s class layering too in Drea, Pryce’s and other townsfolks’ accents set against the RP judges.

Ince and Drea though don’t shrink from John’s abuse. There’s passion still for 17-year-old Abigail Williams, and in Hannah Saxby hands, Abigail emerges both as victim of John and indeed her own desires, and desperately resourceful to save herself. Already a survivor from a Maine massacre, and knowing how young women are vilified, Saxby channels Abigail’s vicious domineering streak from the outset: prepared to use her fists from the start on Scarlett Nunes’ mercurial Betty Parris, whose sickness reported by her father starts the whole scare. And on the older, more complicit Mercy Lewis (Molly Madigan, showing Mercy’s readiness). But then so is John Proctor, and on the terrified Mary Warren: diffident, outmanoeuvred by everyone; yet not lacking survival skills, in Bethany Wooding’s depiction of tongue-tied naivety.

The slow build from petty status-pinching vicar to Deputy Governor isn’t remorseless. If Steve Furst’s town-hostile Reverend Parris sets snares for Proctor, Jo Stone-Fewings’ Reverend Hale shows at first a burnished front: an intellectual full of science but still infused with noting marks of the devil, again a bizarre precision mix of rational scales and superstition. Stone-Fewings in one of the strongest performances moves from avuncular authority, and easy-mode dispensing with Furst’s peevish Parris through confronting Danforth and finding himself slowly shattered as a believer in marks and as an authority. He never loses his grandeur (unlike some) and doesn’t arrive in rags when back from his ministering exile. But he emerges returned as a humanist in a world, that like neighbouring Andover has already turned away from madness.

There’s a peacock vanity in Gareth Snook’s Deputy Governor Danforth, a man alive to his importance and temporary king status: and anxious to keep it. Snook eschews the grave and inky-voiced Danforths of the past to illuminate a quick-witted lawyer so intent on winning his points he’d let a whole village hang than his reputation. He’s stripped to his horrific inhumanity: power rampant and uncontrolled, save in manner. He’s without dignity or a reverse gear.

Giles Corey (Howard Ward) shows here more mercurial than most, with his sudden switches of decision at the end of Act One, but surprises most when he breaks down in tears. This is a more vulnerable Corey than we’re used to, still with all his defiance and truculence. Stuart McQuarrie’s snarling Thomas Putnam and probing if overborne Judge Hathorne. Sarah Merrifield’s Tituba, rent apart over all the inquisitions marks a kind of ecstatic retreat from sense.

Glyn Pritchard makes a deeply moving impression Francis Nurse, a man without Corey’s fight, but a straightforward humanity shaming the court. Joshua Dunn’s Cheever is all puffed-up truculence with his court role, and contrasts with James Groom’s warm, pleading Willard, trying to defuse a tinderbox in his official capacity.

Sarah Belcher’s Ann Putnam and particularly Sarah Good show the stark madness of the innocent accused, in her righteous bewilderment. Even more, Sarah Cullum as Martha Corey (and Ruth Putnam) is rendered

But Joanne Howarth’s Rebecca Nurse is heartbreaking, and delivers her final line about having no breakfast – as her life is tossed away – like a trifling apology.

Shaw’s music is delivered by Saxby, Madigan and Aisha-Mae McCormick’s Susanna Walcott both on the balcony and on platform, with the slightly bleached costumes affecting a wild dissolve. There’s a stripped-back authenticity to this production, rich in echoes and clarity, that renders it perennial. Its relevance is the clearer for letting detail speak in what for me is Miller’s masterpiece. A unique, unforgettable revival.

Assistant Director Lindsay McAllister

French Horn Helen Kuby, Musical Director / Trombone Hilary Belsey, Percussion Rosie Bergonzi, Beth Higham-Edwards, Trumpet / Flugelhorn / Saxophone Sarah Field

Movement Director/Choreographer Ebony Molina, Fight Directors Maisie Carter and Kevin McCurdy, and Intimacy Director Raniah Al-Sayed. Voice and Text Annemette Verspeak. Dialect Coach Aundrea Fudge.

Co-Costume Designer and Costume Supervisor Megan Rarity, Globe Associate – Movement Glynn MacDonald, Head of Voice Tess Dignan

Head of Production Wills, Head of Stage Bryan Paterson, Head of Wigs, Hair and Make-up Gilly Church, Head of Wardrobe Emma Lucy-Hughes, Head of Company Management Marion Marrs, Head of Props Emma Hughes

Stage Manager Jenny Skivens, DCMs Kristy Bloxham, Carol Pestridge, DSM Jade Hunter,  ASM Roma Radford, Camila Hoyos Stuttle, Casting Becky Paris CDG. Producer Ellie James

Published May 22, 2025May 22, 2025 by Simon Jenner