The Crucible

The Lyric Theatre, Belfast

The first thing that strikes you about Conall Morrison's electrically-charged new production of The Crucibleis the sense that the new Lyric Theatre, with its spurring intimacy and startling angles, has been reflected back on itself. If Sabine Dargent's set, panelled in deep-stained wood, makes it hard to say where the auditorium ends and the performance space begins, it also helps to shrink the distance between Arthur Miller's well-worn allegory and a contemporary audience.

In something that is less a staging than an immersion, we could have been sealed into a fractious 17th century farmstead or summoned, with impressively orchestrated scene changes, to an eruptive Salem courthouse.

Delivered in a stew of Irish accents (a decision that neither jars nor distracts) the weight of Miller’s words is deftly handled, the growing tension of a community devouring itself prickles through mood, movement and Conor Linehan’s arresting music, while time and place bleed steadily into each other.

Inspired, perhaps, by the bracing angles of the new theatre and the crisscross perspective allowed by its auditorium, director Morrison doesn’t force a particular reading on Miller’s allegory. Some will extract the chilling spectre of 1950s McCarthyism from this witch-hunt, as readily as a nut from a shell, others may update to religious extremism or relocate to sectarian division. But Morrison allows us clear sight of everything that’s there.

“We cannot look to superstition in this,” counsels Ruairi Conaghan’s energetic Rev Hale. “The Devil is very precise.”

The scoffing irony of those words becomes the tragedy of the play: once the first delusion is accepted, the others fall supportively into place. By the time Patrick O’Kane’s taut, tormented John Proctor traces all this hysteria, bitterness and land-grabbing to the jealousy of one spurned girl (Aoife Duffin, whose Abigail is a bad girl in a town of Goodies), it is too late: “We must look to cause proportionate.”

Extremism will not be calmed, and the lives and reputations of Proctor, Catherine Cusack’s betrayed and softly depressive Elizabeth, and several others, face a stark dilemma: confess or be hanged.

There's a dissonance in The Cruciblethat few resolve: a male anxiety over female power that can seem as much Miller's as that of Puritan judges in pointy hats. Nowhere is this better realised than the sight of Alan Stanford's leonine Danforth backing away from the fiery purpose of Duffin's tiny accuser, but even in O'Kane's commanding performance, whose fall resounds with the crash of a redwood tree, we are still left with a drama set against an historical persecution of women that resolves itself in the noble struggle over the name and conscience of one man.

And yet, in this production’s generous clarity, the conviction of its cast, the detail of its design and the pulse of its purpose, there is something more stirringly befitting of a new theatre and a classic play: an invitation to see things differently.

Runs until June 5th