THE CRUCIBLE
Photo: Miles Davies
One can never fault Brighton Little Theatre for their ambition, year on year they take on major works of new and established drama, and season on season they seem to pull it off. Despite the small, or should I say intimate confines of their house, they produce some splendid theatre, defying their limited space their achievements are huge.
This time we are given a classic work of American theatre, Arthur Miller‘:s allegorical play The Crucible. It’s a huge work with a massive cast, an element that has great appeal to a community theatre company, but it is a demanding piece, densely written and complex. It takes a talented director, a creative designer and a company of more than confident actors to get it right, but once again BLT pull it off.
Photo: Miles Davies
I’m going to start with the setting and lighting, so often left as a footnote but here worthy of top billing. Steven Adams has created a simple, stylish and effective solution to the challenges presented, the shift from place to place conjured from graphic timbers, architecture and nature in one stroke. Beverly Grover lights it with a simple but confident hand, never once resorting to trickery, a purity of classic stage craft.
The company, a large ensemble, have taken on board the gravity of the work. There is little humour in Miller’s script, a few lighter moments perhaps, but there is an appropriate solemnity and sense of terror throughout.
This is a dark work and it is here held in place by some very fine playing by the entire company. The play is very much centred on the male characters, and whilst the female roles are key to the story, their parts are nowhere near as expansive as the male roles. Of course this is true of the importance given to woman’s place in society it the 1690s, Miller does not give them a right to reply. It’s not a fault, merely an observation and perhaps someone might at some point re-write the whole from a female perspective. All this said we are given some excellent performances from the female roles as portrayed.
Photo: Miles Davies
The men do get the bigger challenges and they certainly meet them. Thomas Dee is an excellent Reverend Parris, wonderfully portrayed, a flawed and obsessive young man, driven and damaged. Andy Bell makes a marvellous John Proctor, again flawed but finally the redeemed martyr, and such power to his delivery with never a loss to the clarity of diction. Few can shout in this way without losing a word of Miller’s brilliant writing.
Joseph Bentley’s Reverend Hale is a picture of pious hope and desperation delivered with a calm reserve, a very impressive performance. Finally Deputy Governor Danforth, here played by Leigh Ward with an oppressive darkness and sense of right, again a powerful and threatening presence and again a clarity of diction that could reach the far corners of a massive venue and here had the beams of the BLT rattling and the hairs on the back of my neck prickling.
Phone: Miles Davies
Director Nettie Sheridan has hit her stride with this fine production. It is confidently played out, the parallels to McCarthyism there but not over-wrought and the chilling allusions to the present all to clear. She uses the space so well, beautifully placing the action within that small stage so that it never feels cramped, even when the scenes are full of characters. But above all, the direction here allows the words to ring out and Miller’s script to come to life.
Another first class production from a first class community theatre that define what is great about that much misunderstood “A” word!
Andrew Kay
14 September
Brighton Little Theatre
Rating:
