The Body of Salem, Its Nerves Frayed ‘The Crucible,’ by Arthur Miller, Plays at the Old Vic
Ben BrantleyJuly 11, 2014: The Puritan torturers who try to break the spirit of John Proctor, the honor-bound hero of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, have nothing on the devastating revival of that play that recently opened at the Old Vic. As directed by Yael Farber, this three-and-a-half-hour production applies unrelieved pressure to your nerves — and, it would seem, muscles that include the heart — until you’re a submissive puddle of pity and terror. In doing so, Ms. Farber makes the most convincing case that I’ve encountered for the greatness of this 1953 drama about the Salem witch trials, a longtime staple of American high school reading lists and community theaters. Her interpretation brings out this play’s echoes of Greek tragedy, where conscious words and actions are rooted in cavernous depths. Like Ms. Farber’s galvanizing Mies Julie, a retelling of Strindberg’s psychodrama, her latest offering is charged with a brute physicality. We’re always aware of the nearness of Miller’s 17th-century New Englanders to the soil they till, and to potential violence.
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