Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
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by Arthur Miller, directed by Albert Schultz
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
August 9-October 6, 2012
John Proctor: “Is the accuser always holy now?”
Soulpepper is currently staging a riveting production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. It’s sad but true that this play about mass hysteria and the search for scapegoats has never lost its relevance since it was first staged in 1952. Miller may have originally used his depiction of the Salem Witch Trials as an analogue for the hunt for communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, where merely to be accused of being a communist could ruin a career. But since that time we’ve heard a U.S. president say, “You’re either with us or with the terrorists”, which sounds rather too much like the words of Deputy Governor Danforth, the judge in the play presiding over the trials: “A person is either with this court or must be counted against it.”
What strikes us as especially up-to-date is Miller’s dissection of what life is like in the 17th-century province of Massachusetts where there is no separation of church and state. Judges in Miller’s play, as certain politicians south of the border do about the United States, refer to Massachusetts as a “Christian country”. There people can be tried and executed for offences against religious laws. As Danforth explains, witchcraft is an “invisible” crime, so that merely to be accused of it can prompt detention. What is particularly frightening in 2012 is the ignorance and inherent religious prejudice of those who think the state should enforce “Christian values”. Sixty years ago Miller gave is a disturbing portrait of how such a system so easily lends itself to abuse.
The production is studded with excellent performances. Stuart Hughes gives the performance of a lifetime as John Proctor, an ordinary farmer on the outskirts of Salem who wants nothing to do with the nonsense going on there. Proctor is no saint, having committed adultery with the housemaid during his wife’s illness, but as Hughes shows so heart-wrenchingly such a man can become a hero and martyr to maintain his personal integrity. Never has Hughes channeled such emotion with such force as he does in the final moments of the play.
Oliver Dennis is excellent as Reverend John Hale, a man called in to assess the situation in Salem. Dennis carefully delineates how Hale’s initial belief in witchcraft and punishment for it wavers when reason reveals other explanations for what is happening. By the end he glows with more fire against the proceedings in Salem than he showed when he thought them just.
Joseph Ziegler is especially fine as Deputy Governor Danforth, who so unswervingly believes in the rightness of the trials and in his judgement. Yet, when doubts appear as to the validity of accusations of the group of girls who began pointing out witches, Ziegler shows us that beneath all of Danforth’s seeming imperturbability beats the heart of a coward. Derek Boyes also gives a solid performance as Reverend Parris, whose enthusiasm for persecuting witches demonstrates how a weak man can be so easily corrupted by the possession of too much power.
Patricia Fagan plays Proctor’s wife, Elizabeth, a role she played back 1999 when a theatre student at George Brown College. She excelled in the role then and she does now although her performance has become much more muted. She plays Elizabeth as if she were preoccupied with guilt for having been a “cold” wife to Proctor and providing him with such a “cold” household and therefore cannot blame him for his unfaithfulness even though she cannot forget it. Under Albert Schultz’s keen direction, her last conversation with Proctor is filled with emotions far too complex and conflicting for her to express.
In minor roles, Michael Hanrahan and Raquel Duffy are well matched as the thoroughly dislikable couple of Mr. and Mrs. Putnam. His piousness is undermined by his interest in buying land left vacant by those condemned as witches. Her search for witches seems nothing more than an attempt to find a scapegoat to blame for her misfortunes in childbearing. Nancy Palk makes an impression incommensurate with her small time on stage as Rebecca Nurse, whose rationality and stoicism awe even those set against her. William Webster provides some welcome comic relief as Giles Corey, an aged, litigious man, whose will never to give in to an unjust cause shows even in his death.
The Crucible runs in repertory with Bulgakov’s The Royal Comedians and like that play makes use of the graduating class of the Soulpepper Academy. Their unpreparedness for the stage is still evident in scenes like the one in Act 2, when the girls who are the prime accusers feign visions and possession to distract the court from accusations that they are frauds. I’ve seen that crucial scene made much more frightening elsewhere, as in the Shaw Festival’s fine production in 2006. Two young women who had tiny roles in the Bulgakov have major roles here. Hannah Miller plays Abigail Williams, the girls’ leader, who masterminds the plot simply to escape the shame of their illicit nighttime revelry but then sees it as a means to win Proctor, her former lover, as her own. She is great at depicting Abigail’s unbridled rage and malice, but less secure in the scenes with Proctor in Act 1. Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster has the key role as Mary Warren, the Proctors’ maid and John Proctor’s prime witness to prove the girls’ deceit. Her show of officiousness toward her employers is disturbing, her remorse convincing and her return to deceit chilling.
Lorenzo Savoini has designed a beautifully simple set – one raked rectangle of wooden boards as the playing area and one rectangle of wooden boards of the same size perpendicular to it hiding all the doors and windows needed throughout the action. The starkness of the horizontal and vertical planes, evocatively lit by Steven Hawkins, reflects both the simplicity of everyday life in the colony and the severity of its moral climate.
Schultz has given the action both a sense of inexorably mounting tension and the effect of inescapably irising in from the hysteria of the community at large to focus on the personal tragedy of Elizabeth and John Proctor. This is one of the best and certainly one of the most powerful of Soulpepper’s recent large-scale productions.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Michael Hanrahan, Stuart Hughes and Derek Boyes. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit http://www.soulpepper.ca.
2012-08-16
The Crucible