Review: The Crucible, Shakespeare’s Globe

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible might be set in 17th-century Massachusetts, but it feels eerily at home on the open-air stage of Shakespeare’s Globe. With its historic setting, timbered galleries and warm lighting, the Globe proves to be an inspired setting for Miller’s parable of hysteria, suspicion and moral reckoning. Director Ola Ince leans into this, crafting a production that feels potent, immediate and deeply unsettling.

The actors are already in role fifteen minutes before the play begins, milling about the space praying, cleaning, casting wary glances and pointing rifles. It’s a quietly chilling choice, drawing the audience into a world where fear and rumour have already taken root. That atmosphere never lifts. Ince’s direction is taut and clear, sustaining a relentless momentum as the paranoia gathers pace and the ludicrous logic of justice collapses under its own weight.

What makes this Crucible especially powerful is the clarity it brings to Miller’s dense script. With unavoidable lack of lighting shifts or curtains, the production nonetheless guides the audience expertly through the play’s complex series of accusations with realistic sets that make full use of the wide stage, creating a broad canvas and plenty of space for the large cast.

The acting is uniformly excellent. Gavin Drea brings an unvarnished honesty to John Proctor, grounding the role in a physical intensity and emotional transparency that’s deeply compelling. As his wife Elizabeth, Phoebe Price delivers a performance of remarkable restraint and emotional intelligence, finding nuance in a character often reduced to a moral touchstone. Together, they mine the Proctors’ strained relationship for all its tragic potential, particularly in the agonising final scenes.

Stuart McQuarrie is a truly pompous and blinkered Judge Hathorne, and is all the more chilling for it. His complete lack of self-awareness adds a bitterly comic edge that only sharpens the injustice on display. The wider ensemble is tight, each member contributing to the growing sense of collective paranoia and collapse.

Music is used sparingly but effectively: the low throb of drums and haunting choral singing provide a sense of menace and continuity, helping to mark transitions between acts in a space with few theatrical devices to fall back on.

If there is a slight misstep, it lies in the use of the yard, where the audience stands. This is normally a winning feature of productions at The Globe. However, while actors occasionally enter through the crowd, these moments feel underutilised, creating minor disruptions without a clear payoff. In one instance, six actors begin a courtroom scene seated among the audience, only to quickly reassemble onstage. I couldn’t help but feel that the use of this space was somehow expected, but that the director didn’t quite know how to really knit the play’s paranoia into the knot of the audience.

A more unavoidable disruption came in the form of a loud and persistent helicopter, which circled overhead throughout the entire first half. In a setting that can often feel magical, this was a frustrating intrusion although the cast’s vocal projection and focus never faltered. Clarity, even amid chaos, seems to be a hallmark of this production.

This is a powerful and impressively lucid Crucible, one that makes full use of its unique surroundings while never losing sight of the human cost at the heart of Miller’s play.

Written by: Arthur Miller
Directed by: Ola Ince
Music by: Renell Shaw
Designed by: Amelia Jane Hankin

The Crucible plays at Shakespeare’s Globe until Saturday 12 July.