Arthur Miller's The Crucible had been billed as one of the highlights of the 2016-17 season at the Grand Theatre de la Ville de Luxembourg, and so it turned out to be.
Although it had just two performances, on Thursday and Friday evenings, demand for tickets exceeded supply - many young people turned out on the opening night, always a good thing to see.
The dark set evoked images of, looking back, what we now describe as a dark era. Set in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, in the middle of the "witch trials", a time of strictness and intolerance and when rationale was superceded by fear and paranoia, and more than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft and 20 were executed. The - by and large - dark clothing and simple but very effective lighting illuminated what was necessary for the audience to see on stage for each scene.
With the opening scene set in the woods and featured a number of young girls dancing, and quickly returning indoors to the interiors of a number of houses, the strict and puritanical Reverend Parris was livid that members of his congregation would "let the Devil inside them". Therefore followed strong and stirring dialogue between the main protagonists, the girls and their families, and Reverend Parris, in which finger-pointing and betrayal were commonplace.
It must be remembered that Arthur Miller wrote this play in 1953 at the height of McCarthyism, when Senator Joseph McCarthy led a vociferous campaign against alleged communists in the US government and other institutions...
Although The Crucible was performed by the Queens Theatre Hornchurch (London, UK), it did offer the possibility for three Luxembourg actors to participate - Anne Klein, Hana Sofia Lopes and Sophie Mousel.
It is interesting that one of the most plausible theories about why the people of Salem behaved in the way they didwas a combination of the warm and damp weather for a fungus on rye and other cereals used for baking and cooking that caused spasms and hallucinations, coupled with many families at the time had housemaids from the West Indies where voodoo was practiced and some stories they told to the children of the households were mis-interpreted...
Photo copyright Alessia Chinazzo
