BALLET PREMIERE STEPS TO TRIUMPH
The Crucible (Playhouse) Light in dark places ★★★★✩
FAiTH can be a bad enemy – and an even worse friend. When utter belief in a deity blinds an entire community to the reality of its situation, nothing can be done to halt the outcome no one really wanted.
That is where the puritan community of Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony found itself in 1692, when a young girl called Abigail Williams was pivotal in turning an unfortunate and extremely unwise affair with a married man into a terrifying series of accusations of witchcraft against more than 200 people.
As a result, at least 25 people were executed or died in jail. it was not until the 1950s, of course, that the Salem witch trials became world famous due to Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible.
Though ostensibly about historical horror, Miller’s drama was a thinly disguised allegory of the witch-hunts for communists encouraged by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Scottish Ballet has excelled itself with this world premiere. Contemporary American choreographer Helen Picket has triumphed in a task that was potentially full of pitfalls. But her laser vision and ability to focus on exactly the images and emotions she seeks to portray lend the story a lucidity it would have been so easy to lose.
She is supported in this task by composer Peter Salem, whose score matches the movement of the dancers in all its violence and odd moments of tenderness. His jagged, often dissonant score is vital to this production’s success.
The set and lighting plays its full part, with Emma Kingsbury and David Finn producing a stark, minimalist, enclosed world shrouded in much darkness yet literally and figuratively illuminated by shafts and flashes of brilliant light.
But as always, it is the dancers who made the difference. Constance Devernay was unsettlingly superb as Abigail, a very young woman in some ways wise beyond her years but in others terrifyingly childlike. She revealed the physical embodiment of a girl intoxicated by her apparent power over a whole community, yet unable to gain the true love of the older man who has used and discarded her. it can only end in tears – and it does. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the girl. Or was it the Lord?
As her one-time lover John Proctor, Nicholas Shoesmith delivers a solid performance as a man whose honour drains away until almost the very end.
As his wronged wife Elisabeth, Araminta Wraith, pictured, displays a winning combination of suffering, acceptance and utter anger in a finely charged and impeccably judged performance.
Cira Robinson brought grace, dignity and a certain sexual smoulder to the role of Parris’s slave Tituba, whose African-based folk potions literally fuelled the accusations of witchcraft.
The Salem witch trials were dark days. But this production throws light into these dark places as a reminder of the power of faith, both for good and ill.