Choreographer Helen Pickett’s clever reinvention of The Crucible burns with white-hot intensity and antic energy. It’s a riveting gift of a show for Scottish Ballet.
Heavy on archaic dialogue and authorial interpolation, Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 – famously an allegory for McCarthyism – might seem like a risky choice for the ballet stage.
But Pickett cannily brings narrative episodes that happen off stage in the play to life, out of which emerge a sense of potently un-Puritan physicality. We see Salem’s adolescent girls frolicking in the forest at night – their childish play with shadow puppets gradually turning to a collective pheromonal frenzy – as well as the crucial tryst between married farmer John Proctor (Nicholas Shoesmith) and teenage servant Abigail (Constance Devernay).
The latter is not just some saucy minx but a girl tremulously eager for experience, whose burgeoning sexual power animates her unfurling limbs and develops into the brief bloom of an arabesque. Despite her girlish guile, she clearly believes that Proctor reciprocates her feelings.
Post-adultery, there’s an intricate duet for Proctor and his wife Elizabeth (Araminta Wraith) that finely traces the emotional faultlines of their marriage. Shoesmith’s turbulent dance of contrition is both fervent and unforced – he makes an airborne triple turn look like a sincere apology – while Wraith’s bowed humiliation and rigid outrage develops into a believably tender rapprochement that is nevertheless stained with sadness.
Set against this private turmoil are scenes of public life which use the regimentation and eventual rupture of the corps de ballet to excellent effect. Their modest jumps and gestures of supplication soon develop into momentous dances of devil-based disinformation: out of the girls’ chattering bourrées emerge slashing accusations, spurious screams and fits of collapse. Peter Salem’s atmospheric score mixes devotional songs with jolting electro crow caws and shrieking strings, while David Finn’s spare set and lighting amplifies the gloom.
For all the depressingly resonant themes – falsehood and fear as political currency, the demonisation of women, the re-emergence of an older man’s sexual encounter with a vulnerable girl – it is also a heartening testament to the strength of contemporary narrative ballet.
• At Edinburgh Playhouse, until 5 August.
