Movie review: The Crucible

Richard Armitage and Anna Madeley as John and Elizabeth Proctor.

Cast: Richard Armitage, Samantha Colley, Adrian Schiller, Jack Ellis, William Gaunt
Director: Yael Farber
Running time: 216 mins
Rating: M (offensive language, supernatural themes)

Verdict: Stunning production of a landmark play filmed live on stage.

Great drama speaks to any day in which it is performed. The second-most famous play by the great Arthur Miller deals with the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in the late 17th century.

But it was inspired by the Hollywood blacklists of the late 1940s and early 1950s in which hundreds of actors and writers who had failed to answer Congress' questions about their supposed Communist sympathies were banned from working.

A 1996 film, scripted by the playwright, directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder and Paul Scofield, had a chilling resonance for anyone alarmed by the moral panic about child abuse and in particular the Peter Ellis case. Almost 20 years later, its application to the war on terror is hard to ignore. As Miller comments in a foreword: "Social disorder in any age breeds mystical suspicions."

This is not to suggest that South African director Farber, famous for her play Nirbhaya, about the 2012 Delhi bus rape and an adaptation of Strindberg's Miss Julie, set across colour lines in her post-apartheid homeland, strains for effect. The Old Vic production plays it dead straight: the design is wonderfully spare, the black costumes allowing for tableaux that recall the paintings of the Rembrandt school (the faces sometimes seem to hang, disembodied, in the air).

The story is firmly based in historical events, though it does not seek to be a history lesson. The drama's driving force is lust -- John Proctor's brief liaison with young Abigail Williams. But in an age of unreason, no sin must be forgiven and (Miller again) "old scores can be settled on a plane of heavenly combat".

The show's 3 ½-hour running time allows it to develop the requisite sense of menace as the play draws us into a world where a guilt unconfessed becomes a denial that can be expunged only by death.

Richard Armitage (Thorin Oakenshield in the Hobbit films) lacks Day-Lewis' subtlety but he is solid and convincing in the main role of John Proctor, whose climactic stand ("You have my confession; leave me my name. How can I live without my name?") is heart-breaking.

But he is well-matched by co-stars Samantha Colley, whose Abigail is more cocky than coquettish, and Adrian Schiller, terrific as a man whose doubts visibly corrode his soul.

It's a stunning production of one of the landmarks of 20th century theatre.

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