It’s a common observation that Arthur Miller’s play, inspired by the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, offered a parallel to the House Un-American Activities Committee at the time the play premiered in 1953. Yet The Crucible has a remarkable capacity to cleave to our current ideological schisms and paranoia.
In the 17th century people were terrified of witches; in the 1950s it was communists; today it’s the threat of terrorism. Indeed, you only have to substitute the phrase “electronic surveillance” for every reference to witchcraft in the drama to appreciate how effectively Miller identified the tendency of society to turn on itself in response to a threat to its security. The word of caution sounded by a village elder – “There is prodigious danger in the seeking of loose spirits” – has never sounded more apposite; and it is notable that Deputy Governor Danforth’s justification for his kangaroo court (“No man who is pure of heart may need a lawyer here”) echoes the NSA dictum that, as long as you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
Jonjo O’Neill presents John Proctor as a regular kind of guy, dressed in casual jeans and denim shirt. And though it may be stretching the analogy to consider him a 17th-century Snowden, his desire for transparency unleashes a reaction more cataclysmic than he could possibly have imagined.
He is matched by an equally compelling performance from Matti Houghton as Proctor’s wife, Elizabeth. Her stoicism reminds you that The Crucible is as much a study of a cooling marriage as a boiling conspiracy: her unwillingness to speak of her husband’s transgression with the servant girl is drawn with ever-growing tightness across her face.
The costumes, accents and – it has to be said – some of the performances in Caroline Steinbeis’s production are a bit of a mixed bag. I admired the technical facility with which the shallow, grey dish of Max Jones’s set filled ankle-deep with water through the final act, while failing to see quite how this conceit applies to the play. Perhaps the decision to dress half the cast in pleated smocks and the other in contemporary outdoors gear is meant to imply that the women carry the burden of faith in the community, but the visual dissonance becomes distracting. The production is pitched at an intensity that never runs out of steam, yet overall this Crucible is less of a Puritan sermon than a curate’s egg.
- At the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 24 October. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
