It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Province of Massachusetts Bay during 1692 and 1693. Miller wrote the play as an allegory of McCarthyism, when the U.S. government blacklisted accused communists.
Starring Ben Whishaw as John Proctor, Tony winner Sophie Okonedo as his wife Elizabeth Proctor, Saoirse Ronan as Abigail Williams, and Ciaran Hinds as Deputy-Governor Danforth.
The production will be directed by Ivo van Hove, and will have scenic and lighting design by longtime van Hove collaborator Jan Versweyveld, costume design by Wojciech Dziedzic, and an original score by Philip Glass. Additional casting and design team will be announced at a later date.
And van Hove (working with the choreographer Stephen Hoggett) does wonderful things with his staging...If van Hove's directorial choices generally support and enliven the text, and force us to see it fresh, it's not because he has abandoned his avant-garde armamentarium. This Crucible features plenty of his signature flourishes, some more effective than others...Ben Whishaw and Sophie Okonedo, as the Proctors, give wrenching performances, shorn of vanity, as if the play's message of communal guilt had infected them personally...Saoirse Ronan as Abigail suggests no real excuse for her cold manipulations: She just shines with maleficence.
...van Hove knows how to put on a good old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone spectacle, and he makes us believe it. More controversial is his decision to update the play's setting to what appears to be a private girls' school in the not-so-distant past...Gone is almost any trace of puritanical repression as he brings to the fore the lust of adolescent girls, led by Saoirse Ronan's headstrong and determined Abigail Williams. She's naked in her attraction to John Proctor, and the astonishing performance by Ben Whishaw in that role makes her desire entirely understandable. Whishaw delivers a very feral John Proctor, with something of the little-D devil in him...But at the heart of van Hove's direction is what the play is all about: how the perverse convergence of politics, greed, religion, and, yes, sex creates mass hysteria.
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