review of The Crucible + Richard Armitage interview
My original post vanished into the moderation queue, so here is another attempt, in case people still check the comm, to post two articles I found in (by now yesterday's) Telegraph that have praise for Richard's performance and a few personal insights (plus a link to a third, shorter and non-Armitage-centric one in The Guardian). Here are the links; I also paste the full telegraph articles and accompanying pictures under the cut.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/10943954/The-Crucible-Old-Vic-review-The-intensity-of-a-thriller.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-features/10915442/Richard-Armitage-interview-I-think-Im-quite-a-frightening-person.html
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jul/04/the-crucible-review-old-vic-london
The Crucible, Old Vic, review: 'The intensity of a thriller'
Arthur Miller's play now looks like a cautionary tale about religious fundamentalism, says Charles Spencer - and this staging, starring Richard Armitage, is electrifying
By Charles Spencer
12:01AM BST 04 Jul 2014
Great plays can change their meaning with the passing of time and shifts in attitudes. When I was studying The Tempest as a student, it was viewed as Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre and a moving meditation on the possibility of hard-won forgiveness. These days, it is often regarded as a study of colonialism and racial exploitation.
Something similar has happened with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. His account of the 17th-century witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts was inspired by the paranoia about Communists whipped up by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
These days, however, this superb play strikes different notes. It now seems to be about the present danger of religious fundamentalism, and of the mindset of those who believe that they should kill in the name of God.
In her thrilling production at the Old Vic, which lasts three and a half hours but never loosens its dramatic grip, the South African director Yaël Farber doesn’t labour the point but trusts the audience to make its own connections with our own troubled times. The drama is staged with a mixture of simplicity and dramatic power that builds up an ominous feeling of dread and fear.
As a result this harrowing play achieves the intensity of a thriller, as the girls under the malign spell of their ringleader Abigail Williams (a memorably sinister Samantha Colley), accuses countless decent people in the village of witchcraft. Only gradually does it become clear that Abigail has her own motives for revenge.
The current in-the-round configuration of the Old Vic brings the audience excitingly close to the action as the witch-hunters prosecute the innocent villagers. It also creates the impression that we are in a crucible in which the characters are being boiled down to their essence. Richard Hammarton’s foreboding sound score, with its electronic growls and rumbles, ratchets up the tension like a horror movie.
There is nothing flashy about the staging, which has a stark simplicity. The director creates a feeling of night about the piece helped by Tim Lutkin’s shadowy lighting, conjuring the dread of a bad dream from which you can’t awake.
One of the strongest features of the production is the performances of the teenage girls who make the lurid allegations of witchcraft. They often speak in creepy unison, and screech and howl, shaking their long hair and writhing on the floor. There is an authentic edge of collective hysteria about them.
Richard Armitage, best known for TV dramas and The Hobbit movies, proves an exhilarating stage actor, with blazing eyes and a righteous fury about him, as well as manifest decency. His deep guilt about his brief affair with Abigail, who has become his nemesis, is powerfully caught. And his final reconciliation with his wife, beautifully played by Anna Madeley, who admits her own part in their troubles, proves extraordinarily intimate and moving.
Among the supporting cast, Jack Ellis delivers a sinister tour de force as the chief witch-hunter, Danforth, especially as he puts the frighteners on Natalie Gavin’s terrified Mary Warren as she desperately tries to tell the truth. And Adrian Schiller movingly captures the crisis of conscience of the Rev John Hale who realises a dreadful travesty of justice has been done.
But even the smallest roles come to full-blooded life in a production of electrifying intensity.
Buy tickets to The Crucible from Telegraph Box Office.
Until Sept 13. Tickets: 0844 871 7628; oldvictheatre.com
Richard Armitage, interview: 'I think I'm quite a frightening person'
The star of The Hobbit is taking on The Crucible at the Old Vic. 'It's a big mountain to climb,' he tells Chris Harvey
Richard Armitage arrives in the tiny, cluttered stage manager’s office of The Old Vic straight from rehearsals for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. He’s bearded and dressed in thick shapeless trousers, heavy boots, and a rough collarless cotton shirt open at the neck to reveal a broad chest. He’s a tall and imposing physical presence. Anyone who knew the 42 year-old only as the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit films might have quite a shock. Television viewers who associate him with double agent Lucas North in Spooks, nasty Guy of Gisborne in Robin Hood, or the character based on SAS man Andy McNab in Sky One’s Strike Back would know different.
This role is a departure. Armitage is to play the tormented John Proctor in the playwright’s terrifying account of the 17th century Salem witch trials, in which Proctor’s adulterous relationship with a young woman sparks a vengeful chain of events that leads to the deaths of many.
He says he feels like he has been waiting for it all his life. “It’s such an epic role. It feels as big as Lear to me in terms of what that man goes through.”
The Crucible is an unfolding nightmare of accusatory spite that is seen as an allegory of the anti-Communist witch trials in Hollywood in the 1950s. Can it escape that allegory and find another, I ask him.
“It’s ultimately a timeless play, I think,” says Armitage. “It has lines that feel relevant in 1692, relevant in the Fifties, relevant today and relevant tomorrow, in 10 years, in 20 years, while we’re still destroying each other in the way that we do, in that insidious human way.”
He promises that acclaimed director Yael Farber’s production will be a full-blooded affair. “You can’t play this story without addressing sexuality in this particular society in this time, the masculinity of the men, the femininity of the women, the vulnerability of prepubescent girls. Yael is cooking something which at the moment feels like it’s - and should be - too hot to handle.”
Armitage is a noticeably calm presence but he talks with passion. I ask him how it feels to be facing The Crucible’s agonising climax over and over for the next couple of months. “It’s a big mountain to climb every night,” he says. “There’s a shattering of the character, and almost a reassembling of him towards the end.
“I leave the rehearsal room - and I carry him with me, I carry his thoughts, I dream his dreams a little bit.”
It’s a role that many non-theatre goers associate with Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Proctor in the 1996 film. How does Armitage feel to be up against that performance?
“I remember seeing the film at the time. And I think there are some monumental performances in it. But I think there’s something about witnessing this play in the round - the theatre is a sort of bowl shape like a crucible - with the audience observing themselves across the room at times, that is the most exciting aspect of this.”
Day-Lewis prepared for the role by building his character’s house himself with 17th-century tools. When he was in Spooks, Armitage famously gained first-hand experience of waterboarding in preparation for a torture scene. He says this sort of understanding is essential to his approach to acting.
“There’s a fascination from the actor’s point of view of, if I don’t experience that, have I fully understood the character? You know to an extent Method acting feels occasionally lazy. I was in a stress position today before we worked, which enabled me to play the scene [we were doing] without having to do any acting. I had lost the feeling in my feet. It’s not like I’m pretending I can’t walk. That’s the difference, and that was the thing with the waterboarding. I wanted to experience it for a millisecond so that I could know exactly what it felt like.”
For all its physical extremities, though, it’s a very different role to the tough guys that Armitage has expressed a desire to escape from. “It fills me with dismay sometimes when you look at the scripts that do come to you, that are primarily focused on violence. There are so many other things to play around with.”
His career, he says, has been “a slow climb. I started late, and it’s taken 20 years”. He joined a circus in Budapest straight out of his school in Coventry - he grew up in the Midlands - to get his equity card. He says he can still vividly remember the smell of the elephants and being permanently hungry from his circus days. He then worked in musical theatre before going to drama school in London and joining the RSC. But he says his experience of trying to win bigger roles convinced him to alter course. “You fight for certain roles and you realise they’re being filled by television and film actors, because theatre is constantly fighting for survival and they need names and faces and ticket sales. So I remember actively making the decision, ‘I’ve gotta go and make a name for myself, in television or film, so that I can then go back and do those theatre roles that I want.’ But then you lose track of it, because it rolls and rolls.”
His career in television has been assisted by the fact that women find him sexy. “I still don’t get it,” he admits. He traces it back to when he played mill owner John Thornton in the BBC’s 2004 adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. That initial attraction has sustained itself over the years to the point that a quick scan of YouTube will reveal any number of montages of him in various roles, semi-naked or glowering to camera, set to overpowering love ballads.
“I haven’t seen any of them but I’ll take your word for it,” he says. “I’m so backwards with all that. I know what Twitter is, I don’t use it, I don’t use Facebook, so luckily it does zero to my ego.”
His unwillingness to share his private life with the press has led to rumours about his sexuality. I ask him if, in the era of tabloid witch hunts, those in the public eye live with a fear that one day they’ll wake up to find that they’ve become the story, and whether this means having to censor parts of his character in public all the time.
“I think if you’ve got stuff to hide, there’s a level of stress that people live with. I think I read somewhere that someone said I was fiercely protective of my private life, and I thought well, there’s nothing fierce about protecting a private life. I think it’s worth protecting - for everybody, not just high-profile people.”
Does he feel protective of his sexuality? “No, I don’t feel protective about that. I just feel that it’s not relevant to what I’m presenting in terms of my art form. Anything else, any other talk, chatter, rumours, discussion, diverts from the discussion of the art form, and that’s always been my primary focus.”
In the past, he has described himself as a shy person. “Not any more,” he says forcefully. “I mean… if I’m very, very honest, I’m a big guy, I think I’m at times quite a frightening person.”
In what way?
“I think I’m quite uncompromising. I can’t bear bulls---. And in a way the shyness is me protecting other people from that. I can feel that there’s an intimidation that can happen if I own my full height, and speak at my full volume. So I’ve learned over the years to just tone it all down a bit.”
He admits that being in The Hobbit does have an effect on an acting career. “Having a box office figure next to your name is unbelievably important when it comes to certain castings. But I don’t think it would have made a difference coming to the Crucible.”
And after 13 years of concentrating on film and television, returning to the stage is a very big deal for him. “That’s why it’s interesting coming back now and getting into a rehearsal room and going: ‘This is why I did it. I’d forgotten.’ I’m having a really amazing epiphany doing this, and I think I’ll be a different actor when I come out of it.”
Buy tickets to The Crucible from Telegraph Box Office.
The Crucible is at the Old Vic, London until 13 Sept. oldvictheatre.com
#
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/10943954/The-Crucible-Old-Vic-review-The-intensity-of-a-thriller.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-features/10915442/Richard-Armitage-interview-I-think-Im-quite-a-frightening-person.html
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jul/04/the-crucible-review-old-vic-london
The Crucible, Old Vic, review: 'The intensity of a thriller'
Arthur Miller's play now looks like a cautionary tale about religious fundamentalism, says Charles Spencer - and this staging, starring Richard Armitage, is electrifying
By Charles Spencer
12:01AM BST 04 Jul 2014
Great plays can change their meaning with the passing of time and shifts in attitudes. When I was studying The Tempest as a student, it was viewed as Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre and a moving meditation on the possibility of hard-won forgiveness. These days, it is often regarded as a study of colonialism and racial exploitation.
Something similar has happened with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. His account of the 17th-century witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts was inspired by the paranoia about Communists whipped up by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
These days, however, this superb play strikes different notes. It now seems to be about the present danger of religious fundamentalism, and of the mindset of those who believe that they should kill in the name of God.
In her thrilling production at the Old Vic, which lasts three and a half hours but never loosens its dramatic grip, the South African director Yaël Farber doesn’t labour the point but trusts the audience to make its own connections with our own troubled times. The drama is staged with a mixture of simplicity and dramatic power that builds up an ominous feeling of dread and fear.
As a result this harrowing play achieves the intensity of a thriller, as the girls under the malign spell of their ringleader Abigail Williams (a memorably sinister Samantha Colley), accuses countless decent people in the village of witchcraft. Only gradually does it become clear that Abigail has her own motives for revenge.
The current in-the-round configuration of the Old Vic brings the audience excitingly close to the action as the witch-hunters prosecute the innocent villagers. It also creates the impression that we are in a crucible in which the characters are being boiled down to their essence. Richard Hammarton’s foreboding sound score, with its electronic growls and rumbles, ratchets up the tension like a horror movie.
There is nothing flashy about the staging, which has a stark simplicity. The director creates a feeling of night about the piece helped by Tim Lutkin’s shadowy lighting, conjuring the dread of a bad dream from which you can’t awake.
One of the strongest features of the production is the performances of the teenage girls who make the lurid allegations of witchcraft. They often speak in creepy unison, and screech and howl, shaking their long hair and writhing on the floor. There is an authentic edge of collective hysteria about them.
Richard Armitage, best known for TV dramas and The Hobbit movies, proves an exhilarating stage actor, with blazing eyes and a righteous fury about him, as well as manifest decency. His deep guilt about his brief affair with Abigail, who has become his nemesis, is powerfully caught. And his final reconciliation with his wife, beautifully played by Anna Madeley, who admits her own part in their troubles, proves extraordinarily intimate and moving.
Among the supporting cast, Jack Ellis delivers a sinister tour de force as the chief witch-hunter, Danforth, especially as he puts the frighteners on Natalie Gavin’s terrified Mary Warren as she desperately tries to tell the truth. And Adrian Schiller movingly captures the crisis of conscience of the Rev John Hale who realises a dreadful travesty of justice has been done.
But even the smallest roles come to full-blooded life in a production of electrifying intensity.
Buy tickets to The Crucible from Telegraph Box Office.
Until Sept 13. Tickets: 0844 871 7628; oldvictheatre.com
Richard Armitage, interview: 'I think I'm quite a frightening person'
The star of The Hobbit is taking on The Crucible at the Old Vic. 'It's a big mountain to climb,' he tells Chris Harvey
Richard Armitage arrives in the tiny, cluttered stage manager’s office of The Old Vic straight from rehearsals for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. He’s bearded and dressed in thick shapeless trousers, heavy boots, and a rough collarless cotton shirt open at the neck to reveal a broad chest. He’s a tall and imposing physical presence. Anyone who knew the 42 year-old only as the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit films might have quite a shock. Television viewers who associate him with double agent Lucas North in Spooks, nasty Guy of Gisborne in Robin Hood, or the character based on SAS man Andy McNab in Sky One’s Strike Back would know different.
This role is a departure. Armitage is to play the tormented John Proctor in the playwright’s terrifying account of the 17th century Salem witch trials, in which Proctor’s adulterous relationship with a young woman sparks a vengeful chain of events that leads to the deaths of many.
He says he feels like he has been waiting for it all his life. “It’s such an epic role. It feels as big as Lear to me in terms of what that man goes through.”
The Crucible is an unfolding nightmare of accusatory spite that is seen as an allegory of the anti-Communist witch trials in Hollywood in the 1950s. Can it escape that allegory and find another, I ask him.
“It’s ultimately a timeless play, I think,” says Armitage. “It has lines that feel relevant in 1692, relevant in the Fifties, relevant today and relevant tomorrow, in 10 years, in 20 years, while we’re still destroying each other in the way that we do, in that insidious human way.”
He promises that acclaimed director Yael Farber’s production will be a full-blooded affair. “You can’t play this story without addressing sexuality in this particular society in this time, the masculinity of the men, the femininity of the women, the vulnerability of prepubescent girls. Yael is cooking something which at the moment feels like it’s - and should be - too hot to handle.”
Armitage is a noticeably calm presence but he talks with passion. I ask him how it feels to be facing The Crucible’s agonising climax over and over for the next couple of months. “It’s a big mountain to climb every night,” he says. “There’s a shattering of the character, and almost a reassembling of him towards the end.
“I leave the rehearsal room - and I carry him with me, I carry his thoughts, I dream his dreams a little bit.”
It’s a role that many non-theatre goers associate with Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Proctor in the 1996 film. How does Armitage feel to be up against that performance?
“I remember seeing the film at the time. And I think there are some monumental performances in it. But I think there’s something about witnessing this play in the round - the theatre is a sort of bowl shape like a crucible - with the audience observing themselves across the room at times, that is the most exciting aspect of this.”
Day-Lewis prepared for the role by building his character’s house himself with 17th-century tools. When he was in Spooks, Armitage famously gained first-hand experience of waterboarding in preparation for a torture scene. He says this sort of understanding is essential to his approach to acting.
“There’s a fascination from the actor’s point of view of, if I don’t experience that, have I fully understood the character? You know to an extent Method acting feels occasionally lazy. I was in a stress position today before we worked, which enabled me to play the scene [we were doing] without having to do any acting. I had lost the feeling in my feet. It’s not like I’m pretending I can’t walk. That’s the difference, and that was the thing with the waterboarding. I wanted to experience it for a millisecond so that I could know exactly what it felt like.”
For all its physical extremities, though, it’s a very different role to the tough guys that Armitage has expressed a desire to escape from. “It fills me with dismay sometimes when you look at the scripts that do come to you, that are primarily focused on violence. There are so many other things to play around with.”
His career, he says, has been “a slow climb. I started late, and it’s taken 20 years”. He joined a circus in Budapest straight out of his school in Coventry - he grew up in the Midlands - to get his equity card. He says he can still vividly remember the smell of the elephants and being permanently hungry from his circus days. He then worked in musical theatre before going to drama school in London and joining the RSC. But he says his experience of trying to win bigger roles convinced him to alter course. “You fight for certain roles and you realise they’re being filled by television and film actors, because theatre is constantly fighting for survival and they need names and faces and ticket sales. So I remember actively making the decision, ‘I’ve gotta go and make a name for myself, in television or film, so that I can then go back and do those theatre roles that I want.’ But then you lose track of it, because it rolls and rolls.”
His career in television has been assisted by the fact that women find him sexy. “I still don’t get it,” he admits. He traces it back to when he played mill owner John Thornton in the BBC’s 2004 adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. That initial attraction has sustained itself over the years to the point that a quick scan of YouTube will reveal any number of montages of him in various roles, semi-naked or glowering to camera, set to overpowering love ballads.
“I haven’t seen any of them but I’ll take your word for it,” he says. “I’m so backwards with all that. I know what Twitter is, I don’t use it, I don’t use Facebook, so luckily it does zero to my ego.”
His unwillingness to share his private life with the press has led to rumours about his sexuality. I ask him if, in the era of tabloid witch hunts, those in the public eye live with a fear that one day they’ll wake up to find that they’ve become the story, and whether this means having to censor parts of his character in public all the time.
“I think if you’ve got stuff to hide, there’s a level of stress that people live with. I think I read somewhere that someone said I was fiercely protective of my private life, and I thought well, there’s nothing fierce about protecting a private life. I think it’s worth protecting - for everybody, not just high-profile people.”
Does he feel protective of his sexuality? “No, I don’t feel protective about that. I just feel that it’s not relevant to what I’m presenting in terms of my art form. Anything else, any other talk, chatter, rumours, discussion, diverts from the discussion of the art form, and that’s always been my primary focus.”
In the past, he has described himself as a shy person. “Not any more,” he says forcefully. “I mean… if I’m very, very honest, I’m a big guy, I think I’m at times quite a frightening person.”
In what way?
“I think I’m quite uncompromising. I can’t bear bulls---. And in a way the shyness is me protecting other people from that. I can feel that there’s an intimidation that can happen if I own my full height, and speak at my full volume. So I’ve learned over the years to just tone it all down a bit.”
He admits that being in The Hobbit does have an effect on an acting career. “Having a box office figure next to your name is unbelievably important when it comes to certain castings. But I don’t think it would have made a difference coming to the Crucible.”
And after 13 years of concentrating on film and television, returning to the stage is a very big deal for him. “That’s why it’s interesting coming back now and getting into a rehearsal room and going: ‘This is why I did it. I’d forgotten.’ I’m having a really amazing epiphany doing this, and I think I’ll be a different actor when I come out of it.”
Buy tickets to The Crucible from Telegraph Box Office.
The Crucible is at the Old Vic, London until 13 Sept. oldvictheatre.com
#