The Crucible at Shakespeare’s Globe: 'classic study of hysteria and herd behaviour'

Gavin Drea as John Proctor in The Crucible at Shakespeare's Globe - (Marc Brenner)

Arthur Miller’s 1953 play is a bona fide modern classic, its study of hysteria and herd behaviour – filtering the paranoia of mid-20th century McCarthyism through the Salem Witch Trials in theocratic 1690s Massachusetts – cursing it to endless relevance. But Ola Ince’s solid and well-acted production somehow doesn’t hit right in the open space of the Globe, even though the venue should feel closer to the world of the play than a theatre of more modern design. The script’s solemnities and its artful recreation of archaic puritan language provoke discomfited laughter here rather than shock and awe.

There’s a strong if overly tempestuous performance from Irish actor Gavin Drea as John Proctor, the supposedly decent hero with a tragic flaw, holding out against the madness of the crowd. He’s matched by Phoebe Pryce as his stricken wife Elizabeth, convinced her coldness made her husband seduce their teenage servant Abigail (a nicely volatile Hannah Saxby). The play’s sexual politics have not dated well, but its depiction of the way dishonesty poisons discourse, so that even those in authority who’ve been duped in a lie end up perpetuating it, has a remorseless force.