Mass Hysteria, Then and Now: ‘The Crucible’ At The Globe Review

★★★★

Lately, there’s been no shortage of The Crucible revivals. Reimagined, recontextualised and reshaped for audiences who like their witch trials with a twist, a surge of fresh adaptations have been cropping up throughout the theatre world. The National and Scottish Ballet brought their own versions to a new audience last year, and a revisionist Broadway show John Proctor is the Villain starring Sadie Sink is proving a stealthy hit. Now it’s the Globe’s turn, with Ola Ince taking the helm as director. Ince is known for modernist retellings of classics, both her Othello and Romeo and Juliet transplanting the action into the present, so it’s interesting to see her adapt Miller’s work so traditionally. Ince’s Crucible is situated squarely in its 1692 setting, but in watching it, it’s impressive how much of this seventy-two-year-old play, set over three centuries ago, remains piercingly relevant.

For the uninitiated, The Crucible is based on the real-life Salem witch trials, a historical episode that has grown, with time, into a kind of shorthand for mass panic, political mania, and the bureaucratic theatre of public morality. All Miller’s characters are taken—with extensive creative license—from contemporary records. When a group of young girls, led by the conniving Abigail Williams, are caught dancing in the forest, they spark a wave of hysteria by accusing townspeople of witchcraft. At the centre is John Proctor, a flawed but principled farmer who must confront both his own guilt over an affair with Abigail and a society spiralling into paranoia. Soon, dozens of townspeople—mostly women—are being accused, imprisoned, and sentenced to hang.

It’s surprising this is the first time The Crucible’s been done at the Globe. The venue feels custom-made for it: its Elizabethan design, tradition and architecture helping deposit us in the 17th century. Its curved shape serves as a cocoon and echoes the claustrophobia of a town turning on itself, but can also resemble a courtroom or a community hall. There’s an immersive element to this version already, with actors loitering throughout the space in Puritanical garb as you scout out your seat, conferring and carrying out their daily toils, and the venue only adds to it. You feel part of it from the start.

Ince’s production draws out the play’s sense of creeping dread with a discreet but assured hand. She knows the material’s strength lies in the slow boil—the gathering storm rather than the thunderclap. Gavin Drea’s Proctor is well crafted and you easily buy him as the ultimate antihero, and the wider ensemble, largely female, play their parts well, able to articulate how the strength of women in that era was to seek autonomy through cunning. The small orchestra tucked in above the stage adds heartbeat and dread, tapping out the slow rhythm of collapse. There’s a restraint to it all that makes the play’s final act land with particular force.

With any modern adaptation, it’s hard to escape the filmic influences from movies that siphoned bits of The Crucible themselves. Betty Parris lying stage-right on the bed and sporadically palpitating brings The Exorcist to mind, and the rest is inescapably tied to films like The Village or Robert Eggers’ The Witch. It prevents modern audiences from being able to come to The Crucible entirely blind, but indicates too what a juggernaut it’s been. Its influences seep into everything—most notably horror films, considering it’s a play that doesn’t bill itself as part of that genre, though horrifying it is.

Miller devised the play in the 1960s as a parable for McCarthyism, but watching The Crucible in 2025, you realise it’s wholly applicable to any age’s problems. The phrase witch-hunt” is never far from any headlines discussing current affairs, from Trump to Le Pen to Kneecap. A modern audience might take away how small matters can become exacerbated when wrenched out of context (as is often the case in our social media-addled world, one X post becoming an avalanche), how rapidly we tumble towards tribalism, or how a common enemy is the only prerequisite to acquiring a vicious form of kinship. An atmosphere of paranoia plagues the play’s characters throughout, so it’s hard not to draw instant parallels with what they’re spouting onstage—“I saw Goody Osburn with the devil!”—and your average roster of Instagram comments.

In that context, it’s no surprise there’s been a resurgence in the age of Trump 2.0. Just this week, historian Professor Marion Gibson of Exeter University, an expert in the history of witchcraft, claimed there had been a spike in intrigue in the subject. “People have an interest in histories of persecution because we do live in times where accusations were being thrown about,” she said. At its heart, the play is about the radical acts and atrocities humans can commit under pressure, and in our contemporary climate of fear, we’re never too far from accusing others of being witches or doing so to prevent being accused ourselves. The crucible of the title refers to a test, and navigating life in the 2020s is ours. This adaptation manages to feel modern despite that, and it’s a powerful feat to pull off.

Seventy-two years on, The Crucible has always been a mirror for its audience’s times, and for this reason, it endures.

The Crucible will be performed at The Globe until 12 July.

Words by James Morton

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