This coming January, a National Theatre Live (NTL) production captured on the venue’s Olivier Stage of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible will be available to watch at the acclaimed Chester venue Storyhouse.
NTL was designed to bring the best of UK theatre to cinemas and community hubs across the country and around the world in cities like San Francisco and Tokyo.
Famous for her production of Hamlet, the play will be directed by Lyndsey Turner and will feature a contemporary staging with design by stage artist Es Devlin, a Tony award winner for her work on The Lehman Trilogy.
Accredited actors fill the cast, including Brendan Cowell and Erin Doherty of The Crown, allowing Chester theatre fans a chance to see a brand new take on Miller’s play set around the Salem witch hunts.
American playwright Miller wrote The Crucible back in 1953. It is a partially fictionalised and dramatized story of the witch trials held in the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1692 and 1693, and was written as an allegory for the era of McCarthyism in America.
The Crucible was first performed on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre on January 22, 1953 and starred E. G. Marshall, Madeleine Sherwood, and Beatrice Straight. The inaugural production received a Best Play Tony Award, and the New York Times described it as “a powerful play in a driving performance.”
The Crucible will be performed live on the Olivier stage at the National Theatre and screened live at the Storyhouse located on Hunter Street in Chester on Thursday, January 26. The play will begin at 7 pm.
