THE CRUCIBLE at the Olivier, National Theatre - Children will listen...

The last time I saw Arthur Miller's THE CRUCIBLE, I was keen to see it again.  12 years later, I have...

I was not too keen when the National's new production was announced as it was directed by Lyndsey Turner who delivered a dreary LIGHT SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE a few years ago; I was also dreading what they were going to do with the text - set it in Ukraine or Carnaby Street - the actors holding handheld microphones or texting their lines to each other? 

I need not have worried, Turner delivered a sturdy, in-period production, stripped down to concentrate on Miller's oak-like text, there is hardly any deviation from the grim relentlessness of his narrative.  Apart from the 2010 Regent's Park production I had also only ever seen the play in a 1980 BBC version with a great cast including Eric Porter, Daniel Massey, Denis Quilley and Peter Vaughn - and Nicholas Hytner's 1996 film with Daniel Day Lewis and a chilling Paul Scofield as Danforth.

Arthur Miller wrote it in 1953 as a response to the anti-communist atmosphere that was cloaking America, mainly with the McCarthy trials in the early part of that decade when Miller was himself called to the later House Un-American Activities Commitee where he refused to name names. Mirroring this "scoundrel time" as Lilian Hellman called it, Miller found himself drawn to the 1692 Salem Witch-hunting case when twenty innocent people were executed on the evidence of some of the town's young schoolgirls.

What could be dated polemic, in the hands of Miller, becomes a play which feels as contemporary as the day it was written. Time and again we have seen a situation when what is unreal and unseen is more important that what is real and provable, as long as there is a small group of people whipping up hatred and blame based on a handy believe system, THE CRUCIBLE will be timely - the most obvious recent case being the anti-semitism scam against Jeremy Corbyn and the left-wing Labour members. Miller based his play around the real people in the case with a little dramatic seasoning to give the terrible occurrences a believable basis. 

In the hardline Puritanical community of Salem, as misogynistic as it is pious, the schoolgirls have to think fast when they are caught dancing in the woods at night so their ringleader Abigail Williams declares they were made to commune with the Devil through the spells of a black slave Tituba.

When brutally questioned by her owner and his fellow menfolk Tituba agrees that she was made by the Devil to do his work - as were the people whose names she saw written in The Devil's Book. Soon the girls are caught up in the frenzy of the moment and scream out names of older women and men who they say send their spirits to torment them at night. Abigail seizes her moment for revenge by naming Elizabeth, the wife of farmer John Proctor with whom Abigail had an adulterous liaison when she was their servant but who was thrown out when Elizabeth found out about the affair.

Slowly we watch a small community lose it's collective mind, where to question the madness means that you are a suspect and every moment of possible salvation evaporates as their world spins off into a place where every denial is an obvious admission of guilt and recriminations are fuelled by grudges and petty dislikes.

Es Devlin's bare stone-flagged set with sturdy wooden furniture is very impressive, made even more claustrophobic by walls of pouring, bleak rain obscuring the stage before and during the action. Tim Lutkin's lighting is also kept to the minimum, creating an air of oppression.

The cast are uniformly fine: Australian actor Brendan Cowell makes a sturdy John Proctor, riven with guilt at unwaringly setting the madness in place by rejecting Abigail's advances after the end of their affair although he didn't quite hit the heights at the climax of the play when Proctor realises that, in admitting his guilt, he robs himself of the only thing he can call his own - his name.   

He was well partnered with Eileen Walsh as Elizabeth, a woman whose sense of duty leads her to not only inadvertently condemn her husband in the court's eyes but to make her realise that it had stifled their life together. She perfectly captured a woman whose joy has been lost through childbearing and subsequent illnesses as well as suspicion at her husband's affair.

Nick Fletcher gave us a hissable Reverend Parris who uses the hysteria of the girls to gain a place in the important male power structure of Salem, Zoe Aldrich made Ann Putnam an all too-recognizable figure of provincial snobbery and venal prejudice, Fisayo Akinade was equally effective as Reverand Hale the only authority figure who eventually realises what is really being perpetrated while the doomed forces of good were well played by Tilly Tremaine and Karl Johnson as the tragic real life figures of Rebecca Nurse and Giles Corey.

Erin Doherty was fine as the calculating Abigail Williams, the catalyst for the madness who is always one step ahead of the patriarchy but she was matched by Rachelle Diedericks as Mary Warren; her swift changes from sullen stroppiness to suggesting the loneliness of an orphan in a society ruled by the family to her defiance at facing her co-accusers in court and attempting to clear the name of the Proctors. Her terror was palpable when she in turn is accused by them and her final capitulation was heartbreaking.

Also impressive was Matthew Marsh as Deputy-Governer Danforth. He dominated the trial scene with his flinty determination that the letter of the law be adhered to - even as those letters were being twisted to suit the meaning he gave them: a frightening representation of power which ultimately is what the play is about - the perverting of justice and the truth by those who should be it's custodians.

Although the production had a few timing flaws - I suspect due to it being the first preview - it deserves to be seen.

 

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE: Love and Death

I am finding it difficult to write about the acclaimed production of Arthur Miller's A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE which has transferred from the Young Vic to the Wyndhams Theatre.  Not because of Ivo van Hove's production which grips like a vice but because of the action of one woman in the audience.

Miller originally wrote the play in 1955 as a one-act verse drama which was unsuccessful so he re-wrote it as a more traditional two-acter which premiered in London the next year in a production directed by Peter Brook with Anthony Quayle.

Belgian director Ivo van Hove has stripped the play down to it's bare essentials: an oblong playing area surrounded by a low ledge - and with on-stage seats on either side - feels like a bear-pit and with the single open door in the back wall there is the suggestion of a staging for Greek tragedy.  Miller acknowledged he was inspired by the Greeks in his story of Eddie Carbone who brings about his own inevitable destruction with a relentlessness worthy of Euripedes.

The white, brightly-lit, space serves for all the locations in the play - even the longshoreman's showers - but mainly for the claustrophobic apartment where Carbone lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece Catherine who has a deep attachment to him as a father figure.  Eddie has helped finance her secretarial school lessons but is upset when she accepts an office job before finishing her studies.  Exactly what fuels Eddie's smothering protection of his niece?  The situation is blown apart with the arrival of Marco and Rudolpho, two cousins of Beatrice who arrive illegally from Italy to stay in the Carbone apartment.

With no fear of exposure within the tight-knit Italian community, Eddie gets them work on the Brooklyn docks.  While Marco is quiet and respectful, just wanting to send his wages back to his impoverished wife, Rudolpho is more gregarious and a centre of attention on the docks with his blonde hair and love of singing at work.  Catherine is drawn to the fun-loving Rudolpho which triggers Eddie's jealousy and hatred of the younger man who he suspects is gay and using Catherine as his marital meal-ticket to stay in America.

 

When he realises that Catherine and Rudolpho have slept together, Eddie's jealousy consumes him and after first kissing Catherine he also violently kisses Rudolpho to show his niece what he thinks the younger man really is.  Eddie visits Alfieri, a lawyer who is trusted by the community (and the show's narrator), and hints at betraying the two men to the immigration department which Alfieri warns will make him a pariah.

But Eddie does betrays them and, when they are arrested that night, he dismisses the accusations of Beatrice and of Marco who contemptuously spits in Eddie's face.  Alfieri manages to get them bailed but begs Marco not to go after Eddie who, as he foretold, has been shunned by the community. But Marco wants his vengeance and Eddie wants his name restored, a stand-off that van Hove ends in literally a shower of blood.  It is left to Alfieri to close the play with a halting summation of the tragedy of a man who he will mourn "but with a certain alarm"....

...and it was at this moment in the play that the woman in front of Owen switched on her mobile phone.  

For it's two-hour running time, van Hove's pressure-cooker atmosphere built and built - aided by a constant ominous soundscape - to paraphrase Alfieri about Eddie, it was like a slow car-crash that you are unable to stop but can only view helplessly... all ruined by this stupid woman lighting up the first few rows with the light from her mobile phone.  Owen prodded her shoulder and asked her to please turn it off which she eventually did and after the cathartic relief of the ovation, she was railed at the two women sitting beside Owen and us both.

And what was her excuse for totally ruining the ending of this production?  In a self-righteous tone she whined "I had to check on the children".  That, Constant Reader, was when I LOST IT.  "Why couldn't you have waited FIVE MORE FUCKING MINUTES" I shouted at her smug puss.  Not once did she apologise, not once did that sense of entitlement waver.  

Frankly, I wanted to punch the fucker over the edge of the Dress Circle into the stalls.  On leaving the row, another couple were waiting to tell us they too had suffered through someone behind them rattling their last few Malteasers in a box toward the end of the play and fully understood our anger.  Which of course leads us on to why do theatres sell sweets that rustle and chocolates that rattle?  Why indeed.  And why didn't the Wyndhams give the usual announcement about switching off mobile phones, and why didn't the Circle usher race down to the woman and get her to turn off the phone?

I am sure if the hag had taken a photograph at that moment then the usher would have made her presence known so it leaves you to surmise that theatre managers are more eager to protect their rights over the rights of the audience.  John Waters has spoken about cinema audiences should become more militant - set light to projection booths if they show films out of focus etc. so maybe it's time for us as theatre audiences to have a similarly terrorist approach to idiots.

What angers me is that now this excellent production is forever going to be tainted by this stupid bitch and I don't want that.  I want to remember the excellent work of Mark Strong as Eddie, Nicola Walker as Beatrice who splendidly showed a woman slowly coming to realise the trouble in her marriage, Phoebe Fox's Catherine, Emun Elliott's Marco, Luke Norris' Rudolpho and Michael Gould's Alfieri.

Ivo van Hove's unrelenting direction leaves you breathless as he ratchets up the tension with every scene so any chance for salvation - Alfieri trying to persuade Eddie not to betray the men, Beatrice trying to tell Catherine to stop pestering Eddie - feel all the more desperate when they fail.

Jan Versweyveld's open but claustrophobic set with it's unexpected showers at the start and end of the play works wonderfully as does his lighting which subtly shifts the intensity of the bright light to mirror the shifts within the characters.  A special mention must go to Tom Gibbons' ominous soundscape which plays throughout the action, sometimes swelling into religious choral sound, that keeps you permanently on edge.

I am hoping the memory of the idiot in the row in front of us might fade but I fear she will not... so here she is.

So be warned if you see this person anywhere near you in a theatre.  Me? I just hope she drops dead.

For the second time within a month I have revisited one of the four classic early works of Arthur Miller, his Tony award-winning breakthrough play ALL MY SONS at the Apollo.
Howard Davies has revived his National Theatre production from 2000, this time the Keller home and verdant garden transplanted from the Cottesloe's traverse stage to the proscenium stage of the Apollo.

The show again bears the hallmarks of Howard Davies' best work: an unhurried, clear-eyed production which frames the text perfectly, a harmony of performance, set, lighting & score and a unity of committed performance from the company.The original production featured a quartet of memorable performances - James Hazeldine, Julie Walters, Ben Daniels, Catherine McCormack - and while the present company are all fine, this new production is dominated by the devastating performances of the two leads, David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker.

Davies has retained his invented prelude to the play where we see Kate's night-time witnessing of the tree planted in her missing son's memory snapped in two by a violent storm and, in this production in particular, it helps to put the audience on edge from the start as the play otherwise starts fairly uneventfully introducing us to the Keller family and their immediate neighbours.We follow the events of a summer Sunday in 1946 in small-town America. Joe Keller is a contented man, a local businessman doing well, admired by his younger neighbours and his son Chris who works with him. His and Chris' only concern is Joe's wife Kate who, while loving, has been distracted by the disappearance three years ago of her other son Larry who went missing in action in the far east. She is further on edge at Chris' secret invitation to Larry's girlfriend Ann Deever to visit them from NY.

Ann's presence has other implications for the Kellers as it is revealed that her father was Joe's business partner in a munitions factory and is in prison for causing the deaths of 21 pilots by knowingly shipping out faulty parts, an action for which Joe was exonerated in court by being off ill when it happened. Her admission to Kate that she is no longer waiting for Larry's return signals to both the parents that Chris' real intention inviting her there is to propose. However it's the appearance of Ann's brother George that brings down the house of cards that is Joe Keller's life.As I've said Davies elicits telling performances from the supporting cast, each imbuing their roles with an inner life. Tony Vaughan-Lawlor and Olivia Darnley are fine as the young neighbours, particularly Darnley in the scene where Daniel Lapaine's George meets her again and you get a sense of their earlier romance, lost by the intervention of the war.

Steven Elder and Claire Hackett also bring great heft to their roles as the Bayliss' who moved into the Deever house after Ann and George's father went to prison. They both stood out in each of their solo turns - Elder where he ruminates on the life he could have had and Hackett, looking not unlike Kathleen Turner, when she tells Ann exactly what she thinks of the idealistic Chris.While I liked Stephen Campbell Moore and Jemima Rooper as Chris and Ann, I felt they didn't quite eclipse the performances of Ben Daniels and Catherine McCormack in Davies' original production, particularly Rooper who couldn't quite get Ann's desperation - it didn't ring true when she begged Kate not to throw her out as she had nowhere to go. Still they did both give very touching performances.

Nothing however could match the performances of the leads.It doesn't hurt the Box Office of course that Suchet and Wanamaker are as well known to the general public for their television roles as much as their theatre work but here they transcend such concerns and both give performances of a rare intensity.

David Suchet is an actor that doesn't always engage me but as Joe Keller he gives what I think is his best stage performance. From the start his casual underplaying makes you believe Joe's idea of himself as a man trusted and a pillar of his community but as the action continues along the lines of classic Greek drama, this hubris is brought low when the Furies of his past actions catch up with him. Suchet's sheer physicality was astonishing - when first seen he is expansive and genial, safe literally in his own back yard, but when confronted by George Deevor he changes into a sharp business suit and appears more canny and alert but when his culpability is finally revealed, he seemed to collapse in on himself. In a masterful piece of physical acting, when Joe reads the damning final letter from his missing son, you could almost see his life ebbing away from him as the words sunk in. His delivery as well was faultless, in the opening scene his ability to project while still speaking in a conversational tone showed up Vaughan-Lawlor and Elder who were saying their lines In Their Best Theatrical Voices.

Suchet was matched stride-for-stride by Zoe Wanamaker as Kate. With no attempt to play for audience sympathy, she gave a multi-layered performance of a conflicted woman whose life is ultimately revealed to have been built on a lie.

Kate's wary humour, her desperate belief in her son's survival, her barely-disguised distrust of Ann and her lioness-like protection of Joe were woven together to give an outstanding performance.

Like Suchet, she seemed to live in the moment at all times, never dropping her concentration level which made her a hypnotic presence on the stage. None more so than when Kate unthinkingly blurts out an inconsequential remark which in an instant reveals the lie the Kellers have hidden. It was a mark of the audience's involvement in the action that when she said it there was an audible collective gasp of breath!

The production is again helped immeasurably by William Dudley's detailed set of the Keller's back porch and garden which seems to get more claustrophobic as the action progresses, and Mark Henderson's lighting especially in Act II when the characters are slowly bathed in a blood-red sunset as the truth behind the deaths of the 21 pilots is revealed.
This production also made me realise how much of a companion piece ALL MY SONS is to Miller's DEATH OF A SALEMAN in the similar descents of Joe Keller and Willy Loman through their adherence to the work ethic which propels their own American Dreams. In a world where soldiers are killed due to faulty equipment and the ideals of capitalism are questioned, as with the best of Miller's work, ALL MY SONS is as relevant today as it was in 1946.

The reason the David Laws story has intrigued me a little more than usual is probably down to seeing THE CRUCIBLE at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre last week - luckily when it was sunny - with it's underlying theme of "To thine own self be true".

The evening was a first for a couple of reasons as I had never seen a drama at Regents Park before, only Shakespeare comedies and musical revivals. I had also only ever seen the play in a 1980 BBC production - a memorable cast including Eric Porter, Daniel Massey, Denis Quilley and Peter Vaughn - and Nicholas Hytner's 1996 film with Daniel Day Lewis and a chilling Paul Scofield as Danforth.

It's a tricky play to pull off successfully with it's almost three hours of claustrophobic tension, the production needs to hold you in a vice grip which is equally difficult to do in a venue which has so many possible distractions. Arthur Miller never envisioned having to pitch his soberly savage work of the evil that men - and teenage girls - do against Mr. Whippy vans and speeding emergency vehicles. But while not a total success I think the production worked on most levels.The play of course is the thing. Arthur Miller wrote it in 1953 as a response to the anti-communist atmosphere that was cloaking America, first with the McCarthy trials in the early part of that decade and Miller was himself called to the later House Un-American Activities Commitee where he refused to name names. Mirroring this "scoundrel time" as Lilian Hellman called it, Miller found himself drawn to the 1692 Salem Witch-hunting case when twenty innocent people were executed on the evidence of some of the town's young schoolgirls.

What should be dated polemic, in the hands of Miller, becomes a play which feels as contemporary as the day it was written. Time and again we have seen a situation when what is unreal and unseen is more important that what is real and provable, as long as there is a small group of people whipping up hatred and blame based on a handy believe system, THE CRUCIBLE will be timely.Miller based his play around the real people in the case with a little dramatic seasoning to give the terrible occurrences a believable basis. In the hardline Puritanical community of Salem, as misogynistic as it is pious, the schoolgirls have to think fast when they are caught dancing in the woods at night so their ringleader Abigail Williams declares they were made to commune with the Devil through the spells of a black slave Tituba.

When brutally questioned by her owner and his fellow menfolk she agrees that she was made by the Devil to do his work - as were the people whose names she saw written in The Devil's Book. Soon the girls are caught up in the frenzy of the moment and scream out names of older women and men who they say send their spirits to torment them at night. Abigail seizes her moment for revenge by naming Elizabeth, the wife of farmer John Proctor with whom Abigail had an adulterous liaison when she worked as their servant but who was thrown out when Elizabeth found out about their affair.
Slowly we watch a small community lose it's collective mind, where to question the madness means that you yourself are a suspect and every moment of possible salvation evaporates as their world spins even more off into a place where every denial is an obvious admission of guilt and recriminations can hide grudges and petty dislikes.

Jon Bausor's bare stage is shaped like a New England house so the horizontal doors and windows serve as trapdoors for the cast or props to pop out of is quite effective as it suggests the secrets the town hides and Paul Keogan's subtle lighting cues matched the fading light perfectly.Timothy Sheader's direction was steady and sure but I found the idea of having the girl accusers sitting around the stage who reacted as one to certain things said on the stage to be a bit of a misfire - also there is a bizarre idea to have them moved in a rigid choreographed movement during the scene changes and during the scenes where the girls have hysterical attacks of alleged possession, they came across as Puritan MTV dance routines rather than as violent eruptions of scary hysteria. It was during these scenes when the girls are gripped with this collective hysteria that the production's lack of claustrophobia was most noticeable.

The cast are uniformly fine apart from the central performance by Patrick O'Kane.

As usual he turned in a performance of unnecessary showy intensity - I once read a great slighting review of a Christopher Walken performance that said he acted with all the concentrated intensity of a drag queen who had his wig pulled off. Now I think of that every time I see O'Kane onstage - his final scene which should be Proctor's catharsis was so all over the place due to his over-emoting.

Luckily the rest of the cast were all fine and indeed was a cast worthy of any of the best stages at the NT or west end - Christopher Fulford was fine as Reverend Parris who uses the hysteria of the girls to gain a place in the important male power structure of Salem, Alexandra Mathie made Ann Putnam an all too-recognizable figure of provincial snobbery and venal prejudice, Philip Cumbus was equally effective as Reverand Hale the only authority figure who eventually realises what is really being perpetrated while the forces of good were well played by Susan Engel and Patrick Godfrey as the tragic real life figures of Rebecca Nurse and Giles Corey.

Emma Cunniffe was very fine as Elizabeth Proctor, a woman whose sense of duty leads her to not only inadvertently condemn her husband in the court's eyes but to make her realise that it had stifled their life together. It was just a shame her final scene was thrown off-balance by the showboating O'Kane.

Emily Taafe was fine as Abigail Williams, the catalyst for the madness but the performance of Bettrys Jones as Mary Warren was a marvel. She made Mary stand out from the other girls with a sly wit but also by suggesting not only the loneliness of an orphan in a society ruled by the family but also her defiance at facing her co-accusers in court and attempting to clear the name of her employers. Her terror was palpable when she in turn is accused by them and her final capitulation was heartbreaking.

However the performance of the evening was from Oliver Ford Davies, in towering form as Deputy-Governer Danforth. He dominated the trial scene with his flinty determination that the letter of the law be adhered to - even as those letters were being twisted to suit the meaning he gave them. It was a truly frightening representation of power which ultimately is what the play is about - the perverting of justice and the truth by those who should be it's custodians.

Although the production had the flaws mentioned, it has stayed with me and has now made me keen to see the play again.