Ruth Leon recommends: The Crucible – National Theatre

The Crucible – National Theatre

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Speak of the devil and he appears. A witch hunt is beginning in Salem. Raised to be seen and not heard, a group of young women in a small New England town suddenly find their words have a terrible power. As a climate of fear spreads through the community, private vendettas fuel public accusations and soon the truth itself is on trial.

The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright  Arthur Miller.  It is a dramatized and fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people including Arthur Miller, who were accused, on the flimsiest of evidence, of being communists.

The Crucible won the Best Play Tony Award in 1953 although Miller didn’t care for the production and the reviews were less than enthusiastic. There was another Broadway production less than a year later which was a tremendous hit but that didn’t save Miller from being questioned by the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended.

Now Arthur Miller’s gripping parable of power and its abuse returns to the National Theatre in an urgent new staging by director  Lyndsey Turner.

 The Crucible, constantly revived in English and translation throughout the world, is an unassailable classic of the American theatre.

In this production, with a huge cast,  Brendan Cowell  is John Proctor. Erin Doherty is Abigail.

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