Few canonical dramas punish women as spectacularly as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible — yet The Gaiety Theatre’s latest staging tries to complicate that legacy. The Crucible at the Gaiety theatre, running through the end of March, tells the story of the witch trials in Salem during the late 1600s, blaming the hysteria of the town on a single young woman, Abigail Williams (played by Cahrlene McKenna) whose previous affair has made her begin to accuse other women in the community of witchcraft. John Proctor, played by Adam Rothenberg, is Abigail’s extramarital partner, presented as a broody man with a maidly wife, working to fix his marriage and the town’s hysteria himself. The original text is usually interpreted as a criticism of authority, using the allegory of the Salem witch trials to explore the McCarthyist persecution of left wing agitators in the 1950s. In most stagings, The Crucible is a play that challenges its audience to analyse the manner in which reason and understanding is thrown out the window the minute a belief, person, or group is deemed as dangerous by an authority. Yet, what undergrids the distrust for authority throughout the play is the rampant sexism it relies on to send its message.
The Crucible at the Gaiety Theatre is directed by Andrew Flynn, a well known director in the Irish theatre scene. Flynn has directed at The Gaiety before with plays such as The Ferryman (2025), Hangmen (2023) and, From a Low and Quiet Sea (2023), showing his strong focus on both contemporary and classic Irish theatre, so The Crucible is definitely a departure from his comfort areas as a director. From the beginning of the play, it is clear that Flynn wanted to focus on the actual text, rather than have a reliance on extravagant costumes or set design. The set, being just three plank wood walls, and smaller pieces such as tables and chairs, trains the focus of the audience completely on the characters onstage. This led to the pacing in the first act being quite slow, as not only was the set plain, but the blocking and interactions between characters felt empty on the bare stage. Even with the iffy pacing, the beginning sets out on a clear mission to portray a more grounded Abigail Williams, but in acts two and three, this endeavour was seemingly abandoned.
In the first act, Abigail has tense, emotional conversations with the young women around her, trying to make sense of the “witch-like” actions they had taken previously that night, which left one of the youngest girls in the village bedridden. Not only are her words and actions presented with a ground of rationality and credibility, the way she holds herself and her body language are too. Instead of being played from the get-go as a self-interested, manic, teenage girl — an angle many productions take — Abigail takes lead in her community as a voice of explanation. However, once left alone with the other young women, Abigail’s behavior takes a sharp turn — suddenly she is over the top, loud, and even physically violent. This change corresponds to Betty, the bedridden girl, crying out about Abigail’s drinking blood as a charm to kill Elizabeth Proctor, John Proctor’s wife. This rapid and unexpected change the audience experiences in Abigail’s behaviour changes her from a reasonable young woman into the manic, self-interested teenage girl that helps support the idea of the “man of reason” later on throughout the play.
The aforementioned “man of reason” is embodied by John Proctor, and the concept is present in most productions. The audience mainly sees this in act two, which is centred in the Proctor household, and gives the audience more insight into Proctor’s marriage. The beginning of act two is a stark contrast to the end of act one, which is the intense moment of Abigail’s break. Throughout the second act, Proctor is played as an introspective, reasonable, and grounded man, who is seeing through all of the lies and hysteria the rest of the town is experiencing. However, in this production, Proctor is played quite flat. It feels as though Adam Rothenburg relies more on the performance of his lines rather than the text itself. He uses a very raspy voice, hunched body language, and injects so much gravitas into every word he says that each line loses its meaning in and of itself. In reality, the only reason John Proctor is interesting as a character in this production is because of the contrast of his behaviour with Abigail’s. They are both in a very similar situation, and yet have massively different responses to it. Without Abigail’s presented “craziness”, the person — John Proctor — who doesn’t trust authority cannot seem as reasonable to the audience. So, the whole message of the play relies and revolves around the idea of women being crazy and irrational over love.
This is even more obvious in the third and fourth acts, which respectively take place in the courtroom and prison cell where John Proctor and his wife are ultimately executed. At this point, Abigail Williams has turned into a manic, spiteful, and deceitful, young woman, while John Proctor appears even more reasonable, and takes hold of the emotional ending with his execution. This comparison is what centers both the allegory and emotional tension in the play, and only works because of the sexism it relies on. Overall, this production tries to frame itself as a new interpretation of The Crucible that doesn’t rely on the sexism that runs rampant throughout the text, but it actually relies more on it than other stagings. If one of the most praised and celebrated works of anti-McCarthyist art completely relies on misogyny, does it actually portray the message it is meant to portray?
