Photograph: Manuel Harlan
There is a particular quality to the silence that descends on the Crucible theatre when all dramatic elements in that unique space are operating at their most taut.
Whether it’s O’Sullivan bending to the baize to sink a black for another 147, or a more deliberately created drama, there is a heaviness to the silence that can envelop the place, a silence the audience are complicit in creating, as they hold a collective breath.
Rarely have I felt such a heavy stillness or such an intense concentration, than that which the audience brought to Anthony Lau’s take on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
As associate artistic director at Sheffield Theatres, Lau has brought a fiercely rigorous intellect to his productions on this stage. From a psychedelic Anna Karenina, to a playful The Good Person of Szechwan, he refuses to patronise his audience, demanding we work to understand his purpose, evidenced again here with Miller’s 1953 American classic.
The play opens with the stage populated by microphones and the auditorium fully lit for a significant portion of the opening scene. There is a lightbox hanging above the stage giving us a moment of pause – we’re inside the theatre, but the display with the word “Crucible” looks the same as the one outside. Lau appears to be asking us to consider that we’re not just in the Crucible (theatre), but we are also in The Crucible (play). We are complicit in the action.
The production puts not only Lau’s directorial intellect on show. With Simon Manyonda and Anoushka Lucas as John and Elizabeth Proctor, he gives us an intense and deeply felt love story. Lucas is absolutely magnetic, commanding the Proctor’s marriage and the stage, while small, wiry Manyonda is cast entirely against the type of Proctor we might be used to seeing and all the more impactful for it.
You truly believe this introspective, flawed man when he begs to keep his name, for it is all he has. A deeply affecting take that will leave you trying to unpick the meanings for some time after you leave the Crucible, past that same lightbox again.
• At Crucible, Sheffield until 30 March
