Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible has been a stage-favourite for decades. With its powerful allegory of the 1490s Salem witch hunts for the fear, paranoia, religious zealotry and mob-hysteria in the 1950s Cold War USA, as it is for today’s ‘fake news’, post-COVID exhausted world.
The 2022 VCE Theatre Studies class decided to maintain the playscript’s original setting of the theocratic 1690s Puritan society — but with a renovation of minimalistic styling and design to emphasise the play’s key motifs of religious paranoia and the supernatural.
As a task, the ‘Theatre Studs’ class undertook the highly complex production process of a theatre company — planning, development and presentation. They developed collaborative partnerships across year levels in pairs and groups, as characters, as directors, in technical production, as designers and as production teams.
MLMC has a proud tradition of theatre with a repertoire of shows in recent years, including Get Smart, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Pink Panther Strikes Again. This year’s show included an extraordinary cast of students who have invested several hundred hours of rehearsals, acting and stagecraft development. This multi-talented cast and crew was amazing. They committed themselves to deliver high-quality performances, with the play staged on two nights in Centennial Hall, on 13 and 14 May.
Most of all, what the audience got to see was the special care, community and spirit they had cultivated in this experience together — especially re-engaging their theatrical skills after two years of disruption. Indeed, they exemplified all that is supportive, creative and energetic in the tradition of ‘Mercy’.
