Scottish Ballet’s The Crucible
Scottish Ballet’s award-winning adaptation of The Crucible casts a thrilling, dark spell over Sadler’s Wells.
Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible, was written as an allegory, comparing the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s to McCarthyism of the early 1950s in the States. Its tale of paranoia and fanaticism demonstrates how lies and falsehoods can be amplified by people in authority and quickly become dangerous hysteria in the wider community.
Scottish Ballet’s adaptation of The Crucible, choreographed by Helen Pickett in artistic collaboration with James Bonas, is a bold and thrilling take on Miller’s drama. As a narrative ballet, their take on The Crucible forgoes the rather wordy script and places the high emotions of the story at the centre of their interpretation.
Beginning earlier than the play, the ballet begins with an illicit tryst between married farmer John Proctor (Nicholas Shoesmith) and his adolescent maid Abigail (Constance Devernay). Her movement becomes more animated as she embraces her nascent sexual power but it is not to last. Proctor’s wife Elizabeth (Sophie Martin) discovers the infidelity and Abigail is immediately dismissed. Riven with a heady mix of shame and fury, she heads into the woods where she and her young friends attempt to perform a bacchanalian ritual to kill Elizabeth.
When their hedonistic cavorting is discovered by the pious Reverend Parris and the reverend’s own daughter falling ill, the girls pretend to have been contacted by the devil and start naming members of their community. The production brilliantly demonstrates how these Puritan townsfolk who are so law abiding and religious, with their fantastic precise angular movement, dancing to the tune of their religious leader can suddenly descend, with little provocation, into hysteria: the stage, with its magnificent corps de ballet, suddenly filled with flashes of carnage, savagery and chaos.
The emotional heart of The Crucible is delivered through its three excellent leads. Constance Devernay is captivating. Her physicality matures as the production moves forward in time from light, playful to grounded and raw. In her solos, she delivers Abigail’s inner conflict being both victim and victimiser. The relationship between John and Elizabeth is wonderfully rendered. Sophie Martin and Nicholas Shoesmith exude a natural chemistry, even during Martin’s Elizabeth refusal to be touched by Shoesmith’s Proctor immediately after the discovery of his affair. Their subsequent pas de deux chart a course through their anger, their love and eventual hard-won forgiveness. Their final moments, in bare feet, are truly heartbreaking: the full horror of the chain of events in Salem as we see the couple face their harrowing fate as John ultimately refuses to bow the fervent religious zealotry and falsely confess to witchcraft.
Emma Kingsbury’s stunning set design is both evocative and yet simple: consisting of a huge suspended square hovers over the stage, itself split into four squares, it subliminally creates a cross looming over all proceedings reflecting the dominating power of religion over this Massachusetts community. Combined with David Finn’s evocative lighting, replete with unnerving long shadows, the stage is effortless transformed into a minimalist church, a forest, a living room or courtroom while allowing the focus to remain on the dance. The canny score by composer (and winner of nominative determinism of the week) Peter Salem follows the emotional lurches with a unique brew of the devotional, the electronic and the ominously percussive.
The startling achievement of Scottish Ballet’s The Crucible and Helen Pickett’s insightful choreography is to deliver the full emotional impact of Arthur Miller’s drama without a word being uttered. Their compelling cautionary tale of false witch hunts spurred on those in power remains painfully relevant today. This essential production at Sadler’s Wells will cast a dark spell over you.
Review by Steve Coats-Dennis and Adam Towndrow
The Recs awards Scottish Ballet‘s The Crucible at Sadler’s Wells a bewitching ★★★★★ (5 stars)
The Crucible Tickets
Scottish Ballet's The Crucible runs at Sadler's Wells until 18th June.
And will perform at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, Nashville from 19 – 20 May 2023 and at Kennedy Center, Washington D.C. from 24 – 28 May 2023
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