The Crucible

Sanity returns to the Globe. Recent modern-dress productions have failed to make use of the theatre’s virtues as a historical backdrop. The Crucible by Arthur Miller is set in the 1690s (about a century after Shakespeare’s heyday) and the script works beautifully on this spare, wooden stage. To make the groundlings feel involved, the playing area has been extended into the pit with two separate platforms for the judges and the witnesses. James Groom, as Willard the demented jailer, terrifies the crowd by striding around the arena, barking madly at anyone who gets in his way. It grabs your attention. The dashing Gavin Drea (John Proctor) looks terrific in the

Gabriel Fauré composed his song cycle La bonne chanson in 1894 for piano and voice. But he added string parts later and he premièred that version in April 1898 at the London home of his friend Frank Schuster: 22 Old Queen Street, the building currently occupied by this very magazine. I’m not sure how much Fauré gets played at Spectator HQ these days; his music certainly hasn’t been a feature of recent summer parties. Perhaps Fauré himself caressed the ivories where James Delingpole and Toby Young now prop up the bar. Imagine Verlaine’s poetry drifting out into the garden to mingle with Rod Liddle’s cigarette smoke on the moonlit air.