She has a long and enduring history with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, says South African director Yael Farber. Her 2014 sell-out season at London’s Old Vic was captured live for its global cinema release with showings in Cinema Nouveau around the country from tomorrow.
“I discovered The Crucible via my older sister who was studying the play at school. She and my late father also visited family in the US, and made a trip, text in hand, to the original village of Salem in Boston. She spoke to me of the story in such vivid terms that I was drawn to seek out the text for myself,” she explains.
Two years later Farber played Abigail in a high-school production and already at that young age she knew that she was going to spend her life engaged with such stories. Later, as a young actress, she again took on the role of Abigail in a Lara Foot production presented at the Market in 1996.
With the play such a part of her DNA, when offered this production at the Old Vic, she knew she wanted to create a powerful visceral production, but with a determination to clear the way for the work to shine through.
Using words like “safeguard”, she feels her duty as a director is to ensure that the playwright is the one who has his say.
Based in Montreal, Canada, but also working around the world and at the time rehearsing a play in India, she flew into London for two casting sessions. “I had a wonderful casting director who, after many conversations about each part, would whittle down a list to four,” she says.
She had two crazy casting sessions which started as soon as she arrived, jetlagged and bleary-eyed. But that probably focused her mind. Her leading man, Richard Armitage, met with her in a dimly-lit dining room in Leeds, but, says Farber, the connection and rapport was instant. “I was given a long list of gorgeous men but wanted someone with a specific hunger, who’d make the journey with me.”
It was important in the casting process to find actors who would understand that they were going to find a way to best serve the play.
She laughs at the demands she made on her cast. Anyone who knows Farber’s work is familiar with her physical approach. “I don’t believe in acting from the neck up,” she remarks. And once you see the production, you will know that is the same way she describes her work in Mies Julie (“…we climb, crawl and dig our way through the text. We kneel, float and press walls to find truth.”); her Crucible actors followed suit.
“When we had to do any physical work, they would say: ‘Are we going to gooi now?’ and it became part of the daily routine,” she says, smiling at the memory.
That’s perhaps as much laughing that would come from the rehearsal space because for Farber, it’s a story about people fighting for their lives. There’s urgency in what Miller has to say about mindless persecution and false accusations that gather frightening power. She wanted the audience to feel that, to lean in and be part of the proceedings.
“I wanted to grab them in the gut,” she adds as she talks about these enormous stories that shattered worlds – and still do.
“We live in a post-modern society and can find rough equivalents for the play, but we are so used to detaching from the horrors around us. There’s this horrific numbing in a world confronted with evil on a regular basis,” she says to illustrate her decisions.
Set in the round, the play unfolds in a series of scenes, each starting with an empty space which then fills up mostly with people but also with the odd chair and the elements like water, fire and dirt.
It’s all about telling the story from an empty space, from nothing. “That comes from my South African background where we made theatre with very little,” she says. And it has served her well and allowed her stories to breathe on their own.
She wanted to create a sense of community, of a man and a woman living together, add a biblical sense to the proceedings which plays into the mockery of piety so prevalent in the play. For her, it’s about audiences knowing they’ve come to the temple.
“We have to remember these things in our marrow,” she stresses. That’s the power of stories that really matter – the only ones she’s interested in telling.