'The Crucible' review — this gripping production makes Arthur Miller's witch hunts unsettlingly pertinent

Read our review of The Crucible, starring Gavin Drea, Phoebe Pryce and Hannah Saxby, now in performances at Shakespeare's Globe to 12 July.

Fancy spending an evening at Shakespeare’s Globe, but without the Shakespeare? For the first time in its 28-year history, the theatre has commissioned a revival of a classic play outside of the Bard’s repertoire. It’s chosen Arthur Miller’s perma-popular 1953 hit The Crucible – a warning cry on McCarthyism wrapped up in a small town tale of 17th-century witch hunts – that with its depictions of mass hysteria, floundering morality and a community in crisis always feels unsettlingly pertinent.

In the hands of director Ola Ince, the play retains its 1692 date stamp, and while by-the-book references to Salem, Massachusetts suggest it hasn’t literally jumped location, the flurry of rural English accents on stage are a reminder that witch trials are a smear on our own British history, too.

It is not by any means a revolutionary production, and it’s not asking big questions of the play’s sexism or power dynamics (like the recently opened Broadway hit John Proctor is the Villain), but Ince has a real knack for bringing classic texts into clear, sharp focus without meddling with them. Of course, she still applies a vision, but one that’s faithful to the source. Like her 2021 Romeo and Juliet, also for the Globe, this take on The Crucible would be perfect for schools.

It looks right at home in the Wooden O, where designer Amelia Jane Hankin fills the stage with olde-worlde wooden furnishings scattered with hay, and a scene in the Proctors’ kitchen is vividly embellished with an open fire and much kneading of dough.

Ince uses the entire space too: snapshots of life for this community spill into the auditorium as between-scene montages show muddy-faced townspeople toiling over buckets, or praying at an attic window, or huddled in a cavern-like inn at the back of the stage, gossiping in undertones. And once the girls have begun accusing their elders, a cart is wheeled through the pit, carrying away the first shackled Goodys. If these moments are a little like watching a live re-enactment at a museum, they certainly brings the fear-riddled stench of this toxic town that bit closer.

This is a community in turmoil, where suspicion hangs thick and everybody is swift to point a damning finger at their neighbour. It’s all there in Miller’s text, but Ince’s take drives home the fact the in-fighting is between the disempowered. The girls lack agency before finding status in the courtroom, and their daisy-chain blame game makes sense in a society where the men shout, threaten and push around the women.

The men, too, are trapped beneath a glass ceiling, above which strut the educated men of the court – who have given themselves a godly authority. Race also gets a look in: Sarah Merrifield’s Tituba appears especially vulnerable as a sole Black presence in a room of white accusers.

Hannah Saxby’s Abigail Williams is a bored teen who wears her heart on her sleeve. The rawness of John Proctor’s rejection of her is almost visible beneath her twitchy, mean-mouthed front. Phoebe Pryce’s Elizabeth Proctor is admirably stoic, while Gavin Drea’s performance builds as the increasingly tortured John Proctor, confessing then backtracking right until the end. Most of the other characters are tasked with lightening the mood, and while their humour is surprising, almost all of it is well-timed.

A play for 1692, 1953, and indeed for 2025.

The Crucible is at Shakespeare's Globe to 12 July. Book The Crucible tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Photo credit: The Crucible (Photos by Marc Brenner)