This feels modestly momentous: while Arthur Miller’s classic Salem witch trials drama-slash-McCarthyism allegory is revived relatively frequently, The Crucible has never been staged at the Globe’s oudoor theatre before. That’s because nobody has been staged here except Shakespeare and specially commissioned new writing – Ola Ince’s revival of The Crucible is the first outdoor Globe revival of another playwright
There is, one suspects, a subtext: new writing was intended to make the theatre more than a museum to the Bard, and to give living playwrights a chance to write for the Globe’s idiosyncratic space. But it can be a hard sell to a tourist-centric crowd and new plays have become much less frequent during the post pandemic years. This ticks the ‘non-Shakespeare’ box while likely offering a decent box office return.
It’ll be intereresting to see how this all develops, but it should be noted that The Crucible feels like a tremendous fit for the Globe: set in a superstitious New England just a few decades after Shakespeare’s death, its sprawling cast and epic structure demand a huge space, and by heck the Globe is going to give it one.
