The Crucible
DURING SEVERAL nail-biting scenes the house became so quiet you could hear a pin drop. The Hong Kong Repertory's new season opener The Crucible is intense, engrossing and, as one member of the audience said half-way through the show, much better than the Hollywood screen version that stars Winona Ryder and Daniel Day-Lewis.
Indeed, director Ho Wai-lung's treatment of this Arthur Miller classic (translated into Cantonese by Liu Mei-kay) is crispy, faithful and, to a certain extent, restrained.
Instead of launching into heavy-duty preaching or a message-decoding exercise, it is simply storytelling at its most gripping. As a piece of thought-provoking drama, it does not disappoint. But then again, with a play so rich in its text and characters, nothing can really go wrong.
The Crucible is set in 1692, in Salem. It opens with a group of young girls and a black slave performing a ritualistic dance in the woods, in the dark. They flee in fear when the village pastor, the Reverend Parris (played by Yip Chun), stumbles upon their stealthy activity.
Among those caught casting love spells and dancing like pagans is Abigail (Fung Wai-hang), a lusty, self-centred village girl who once had a passionate affair with a farmer, John Proctor (Ko Hom-man), when she worked in his house as a maid, and would do anything to get down and dirty with him again.
In a bizarre twist of events, Abigail and several other Salem girls turn the situation to their advantage by feigning illness, which quickly snowballs into lies about demonic possession, conversations with the devil, and accusations of witchcraft.
Suddenly, they become God's messengers.
Led by Abigail, the girls turn Salem into a self-destructing maelstrom of dread, betrayal and hysteria, eventually culminating in witch trials and the execution of innocent townspeople, including Proctor's wife Elizabeth (Liu Hongdou) and the righteous nurse Rebecca (Chan Lai-hing).
Miller's play was written as a parable on the McCarthy-era anti-communist 'witch-hunt' in the late 1940s and early 50s, and Ho's subtext runs in a similar vein - that if an ignorant and hysterical public is left in the hands of an equally unenlightened and hysterical government, irreversible damage to society may result.
Fung's Abigail is scheming and possesses great self-control, while Hung Ying-hei gave a notable performance as the naive Mary Warren, a maid for the Proctors.
City Hall Theatre, until May 20. $100-$160 Urbtix
