Theatre Review: The RSC’s The Crucible at the Gielgud

The basic story of the Salem witchcraft trials is well known. At its centre was a group of young women who made increasingly wild accusations about spirits, demonic possession, and malevolent attacks. It is these young women, led by the spiteful, slighted Abigail (Elaine Cassidy) who open Arthur Miller’s powerful exploration of the story, The Crucible.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s version – its first Miller production – has just transferred to the Gielgud in London. This is a powerful, classy effort (as you’d expect), with a highly topical theme. Miller wrote the play in the Fifties, when McCarthyism was at its height, and today, with restrictive new laws forbidding “glorification of terrorism” coming into effect today, and a scent of panic in the air, it is again all too relevant.

The three hours never drag, as a small Puritan town gradually implodes into a frenzy of wild allegation. Miller presents, and the production magnifies, one potential slant of the conflict, as a class and generational war that sees the poorer, younger women finally getting their revenge against the older women and men who’ve used their labour and heavily disciplined their lives.

The production makes particular effective use of the pregnant pause, the long heavy silence, its actors arrayed in carefully composed tableaus that are almost picture-perfect, within stone-grey wallls that hold – just – the threat of nature, or sexuality, of change, without.

Iain Glen as the simple farmer John Proctor with a big secret is a sexily charismatic Everyman, and Robert Bowman, the well-meaning bumbler who arrives with good intentions and soon utterly loses control is convincing. Ian Gelder is appropriate nasty and self-important as the “Harvard-educated, don’t you know” Rev Parris. James Laurenson looks like he’s having a fine old time as the self-righteous hanging judge.

Yet the women don’t get the same opportunities. Miller chose to concentrate on the male actors in the drama; these women, who were after all central to the story, never really get developed, beyond the out-and-out “conniving whore”, as Proctor sees it, Abigail.

Proctor’s wife Elizabeth (Helen Schlesinger), spends a great deal of time on stage, yet she’s there primarily as a foil to his moral quandaries, his guilt, his weaknesses. This is not so much a fault of Schlesinger, or Dominic Cooke’s production, but of the focus of the playwright’s eye. Of the other women, from Darlene Johnson’s powerfully dignified Rebecca Nurse to Caroline O’Neill’s bitter Ann Putnam, we get mere glances.

Could a director who had chosen to concentrate on the women have swung this balance? I could not but wonder. That’s not a criticism of Cooke’s work, as such – there really is little to criticise in this production as it stands. But there is something missing from the experience. Certainly, Puritan Massachusetts was a male-dominated world, but the witch trials were a time when women’s agency rose to the fore. Perhaps we need a female playwright to really explore that turn-around.

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The production continues at the Gielgud until June 17. Other views: the Independent and the Financial Times. An exploration of the historical facts behind the play.