Ruth Leon recommends… The Crucible – Gielgud Theatre

Pocket Review:  The Crucible – Gielgud Theatre

Lyndsey Turner’s National Theatre production of Arthur Miller’s classic play about the Salem Witch Trials of the late 17th century is elegant, thoughtful and respectful. It gives us a period play in every sense of the word.

Designer Es Devlin’s wall of rain which spills its torrents onto the village of Salem exemplifies the panic that spreads when the sexual jealousy of a young girl impels her to attempt to implicate her lover’s wife in accusations of witchcraft. Her malicious but compelling accusations of contact with the Devil, while entirely untrue, become a tide of hysteria which engulfs, first the other local girls, then an entire village, resulting in escalating hysteria amongst the townspeople, more and more of whom claim to have seem their neighbours with the Devil.

The religious leaders trying to unravel the truth are themselves so convinced of the Devil’s presence that no contrary claim or evidence can be accepted. If someone is accused, well, then, they must be guilty.

So it was in the 1950s, when Arthur Miller wrote this play.  In a rising tide of fear, generated by Senator Joe McCarthy and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, he, and many of his friends were accused by of being, or of supporting Communism. and the fear was so great that writers and artists of all stripes left the country to avoid being hauled before Congress to plead a negative – that they weren’t, and had never been, Communist.

“The Crucible” was an act of desperation.”, Miller wrote in an essay for the New Yorker, “I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors’ violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.”

Miller found the parallels for his existential fear in his discovery of the identical fears in the inhabitants of the 17th century village of Salem and its destruction by hysteria, and it is this that motivated his wonderful play.

This current production, while entirely faithful to the letter of Miller’s work, fails to find the contemporary parallels which he wrote about. This Crucible should be making us think about the clear and present dangers of panic and fear in our own times. Instead, it is ‘just’ an excellent production of a history play.

Read more