A Noo Joisey Proctor feels a bit wild at first, but it comes to feel like a great decision. In any case, it would seem to back up the unexpected accents. I’m not sure I quite get the aesthetic: a sense of timelessness perhaps, that intentionally leaves it as neither a period drama nor explicitly modern dress. The pink-clad girls wear retro peasant smocks John Proctor wanders around in a buttoned work shirt with a red T-shirt underneath. I am the precise opposite of a fashion expert, but my best understanding is that they’re a semi-anachronistic higgledy-piggledy of Americana from the last several centuries nothing aggressively modern but not confined to a single obvious time period. Here, they’re American not even proto-American: Brendan Cowell‘s troubled hero John Proctor speaks with a distinct New Jersey twang.

‘The Crucible’ is traditionally performed with English accents, because it’s set in Massachusetts in 1692, and the characters are mostly English immigrants or their children. Once it gets underway, two things about Turner’s production leap out. In fact, it’s more complicated than that. The first impression is that Turner is intent on laying on a colossal, sturm-und-drang spectacle in the vein of the Old Vic’s monumental 2014 production, the last big London staging of Arthur Miller’s 1953 masterpiece.

But the elemental cascade, Tim Lutkin’s exquisitely moody lighting and the acapella singing from the pink-clad chorus of girls is a spine-tingling combination. Once the curtain (of rain) goes up, it’s only sparingly used, with the rest of Es Devlin’s set a minimalist thrust pocked by tangles of chairs. It doesn’t get much more spectacular than the crashing wall of artificial rain that shrouds the Olivier’s stage before Lyndsay Turner’s revival of ‘The Crucible’ starts. ‘The Crucible’ transfers to the Gielgud Theatre in June 2023, with an all new cast headed up by Milly Alcock from ‘House of the Dragon’ as Abigail Williams and prolific Irish actor Brian Gleeson as John Proctor. This review is from the National Theatre in September 2022.

Brendan cowell the crucible