In 2006, Polish director Tadeusz Bradecki engineered another Canadian tour de force at the Shaw Festival with The Crucible by Arthur Miller.
Bradecki mines great performances of finesse and clarity from his actors – centering on the humanity of the text – yet his pieces all have a highly stylized look that never takes away from the core of the story. Performance case in point, former Shaw shows: Federico Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Witold Gombrowitz's Ivona, Princess of Burgundia.
Bradecki’s 2006 production of The Crucible at The Shaw Festival was truly inspired. Bradecki transformed Arthur Miller’s timeless comment into a work of art drawn in a Spartan setting – using shades and ominous shadows, within spare Quaker environs, the Festival Theatre walls resonating with eerie Puritan hymn-song.
Peter Hartwell’s utilitarian set design was truly inspired using a gigantic wooden panel to set three different scenes. Slanted, the rustic partition served as a sparse attic floor for comatose Salem daughter Betty. Horizontally, the panel became a ceiling for the Proctor farmhouse kitchen, and vertically the cage-like Salem prison wall where falsely accused women awaited sentence – Puritan lambs to the slaughter.
This panel rotated on a massive wheel-and-chain mechanism, emulating a ponderous torturing device as it clanked and strained with every scene. As Bradecki intended, I immediately envisioned writhing bodies of the wrongly accused – be it in Salem or anywhere in the world today. Bradecki pulls modern thought and discourse kicking and screaming through historical fact, demanding audiences to take note.
Tadeusz Bradecki returns to Shaw's Court House Theatre in 2007 to direct Brian Friel’s A Month in the Country After Turgenev.
