CentralDramaFeaturedReview

The Crucible – mac, Birmingham

Reviewer: John Kennedy

Writer: Arthur Miller

Director: Nathalie Bazan

An apposite title for a play where every human frailty, vice and vicissitudes far beyond the ken of the SevenTrh Deadly Sins boil and broil until reduced to the very distillation of evil itself. The apotheosis of arrogance, abuse of power and office, venality, antithesis of true Christian morality, hubris and brutal stupidity. What could possibly go wrong? Miller lights the fuse, tonight’s outrageously confident and consummate young ensemble cast races into the pitchblende night with explosive conspiratorial panache.

Hannah Louise’s outstanding Abigail, seventeen, had witnessed her parents’ brutal murder when asleep in their bed. She is the reluctantly adopted niece of Reverand Parris. Of the egg-bound, self-obsessed persona, Alexander Wolverson has him within a cat’s whisker of Miller’s description of him as being, ‘persecuted whereever he went’. Wolverson’s accurate whining need for restitution, justified or not, marks Parris as a dangerous, manipulative hypocrite. He’ll make sure to do for John Procter by Act Four. A convincingly disgusting man all round.

Abigail seethes with teenage rage at her now unrequited passion for John Procter (Mark Gibbons), handsome is as handsome does is a girl possessed, wracked with guilt and shame for she and her friends innocent midnight frolicking in the woods being discovered by Parris, the epitome of pomposity. Gibbons conveys the discreet honesty of a man torn between guilt for his infidelity and desperation to seek forgiveness from his wronged wife, Elizabeth (Lauren Ebrey) There can be few heart-pounding tragic denouements more poignant than theirs as John surrenders his life as forfeit for having his name and honour besmirched by dishonesty. Ebrey’s Elizabeth projects an innocence the hysterical children will forever be denied. Her sense of betrayal by John is exacerbated by her gnawing belief that Abigail has her sights set on usurping her marriage bed. Louise’s Abigail makes that abundantly clear as she times to perfection her demonic outburst at the height of the trial. Director, Nathalie Bazan wields a tight rein on what can easily descend into inchoate chaos. Which of course it becomes.

There needs to be a release valve, a scapegoat, even better, one with a forked tail and horns. Satan comes in handy with a Biblical CV as proof. Abigail broods and festers, her trembling brow more furrowed and adamant than the unyielding fields Procter blasphemously ploughed on the Sabbath. An approximation of all Hell breaking loose unfolds. Oliver Harry Brooks takes on the Reverand John Hale as his own. Smirkingly assured his tracts of detailed Demonology, his, ‘…painfully acquired armoury of symptoms, catchwords, and diagnostic procedures,’ providing the answer to all of Salem’s proclivities. Brooks has him firmly in his sights as a learned man and a lethal, damn fool with it. A mention for Ola Jeboda’s whose portrayal of Tituba encapsulates Miller’s text notes – ‘she is very frightened because her slave sense has warned her that, as always, trouble in this house eventually lands on her back.’ Quite literally. Myke Jacob’s duck-to-water portrayal of the arrogant, self-important and very dangerous Governor Danforth is a study in regal vanity. This is lent dramatic emphasis by having him stand at the rear auditorium’s outer circumference, bearing down with authoritative majesty. Notwithstanding, every cast member discharges their role with affirmative assuredeness too numerous to further single out. As for those ‘Salem Girls’ Ensemble? Best not cross them on a dark night in their jimjams.

In Miller’s Salem, the Devil certainly finds work for idle hands, manifesting in the embittered, vexatious and revengeful minds of supposedly good men doing God’s work. ‘The Devil can never overcome a minister,’ proclaims Hale, oblivious of his specious, hubristic irony.

This is a beast of a play to get right let alone lend it youthful vibrancy and dynamic, interpretive originality. BTA Students in Association with Lying Lips Theatre Company, lend insight and insistence to the minutiae of character insights and historical legitimacy and seriously nail it tonight.

Lips have proven themselves to be exceedingly astute with past form including Hecuba, Tis’ Pity She’s A Whore and swanning about the Stratford banks of Avon with their past Summer’s roller-coaster riff on The Tempest.

The Hexagon Theatre, tonight might bear more resemblance to those Victorian surgeons’ lecture theatres renowned for their eminent dissections of involuntary cadavers provided by Resurrection Men. The analogy is not spurious. Miller’s relentless evisceration of religious ideological fascistic fanaticism, its dreadful collateral damage, remains apposite as ever.

Reviewed on 28 October 2024

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The Central team is under the editorship of Selwyn Knight. The Reviews Hub was set up in 2007. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.

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