The National Theatre in London is to stage Arthur Miller’s classic play The Crucible in a revival which its artistic director Rufus Norris says will “explore what it means to confront power in a time of political and social divide”.
The Crucible will be directed by Lyndsey Turner in the National’s Olivier theatre, which has not presented Miller’s historical drama since 1990. “A revival of this story of mass panic and collective delusion seems particularly timely,” observed Norris, who said it would make for a “darkly thrilling production”.
The Australian actor Brendan Cowell has been cast as farmer John Proctor. Erin Doherty, best known for portraying Princess Anne in The Crown, will play Abigail Williams whose past affair with Proctor leads her to stoke the hysteria about witchcraft that breaks out in 17th-century Salem. The scenario is used as an allegory for the anti-communist “red scare”, a political witch-hunt spearheaded by the House Un-American Activities Committee and senator Joseph McCarthy that reached boiling point in the 1950s.
Doherty said that “to be working with Lyndsey Turner on this play at the National is immensely exciting and still utterly unbelievable to say out loud. I can’t begin to describe how grateful I am to get to rip open and explore a being as complex as Abigail Williams.”
“The critics were not swept away,” wrote Miller of The Crucible’s first staging in 1953 but it has become one of his most frequently revived plays thanks to its potent consideration of persecution, suspicion, deception and the abuse of power. Ben Whishaw played Proctor in a Broadway production directed by Ivo van Hove in 2016 and Yaël Farber staged it at London’s Old Vic in 2014 with Richard Armitage in the role. Miller observed of his play: “I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there – it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.”
The Crucible will open in the Olivier theatre in September. The following month, the National’s smaller Dorfman theatre will present The Boy With Two Hearts, the true story of an Afghan family forced to flee the Taliban and seek lifesaving health treatment in the UK. The play was produced by Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff last year and is based on the book of the same name by Hamed Amiri. It will return to Cardiff before its National run. Graeme Farrow, artistic director of Wales Millennium Centre, said: “This is a Welsh story and an Afghan story that deserves as wide an audience as possible, particularly as the number of people fleeing violence and persecution rises across the globe.”
The National also announced details of a UK and Ireland tour of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, its popular 2021 adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book. The 40-week tour starts at the Lowry in Salford and is the largest tour mounted by the National since the Covid-19 pandemic began.
