In the centenary year of Arthur Miller’s birth, his play about the Salem witch trials takes on yet another shade of meaning. When first staged, The Crucible rang out with a denunciation of McCarthyism. Since 9/11 it has seemed to glance at the Patriot Act, religious fundamentalism and the unreliability of confession under duress. In Tom Morris’s big, fiery staging, a particular line rings out as never before: “Is the accuser always right?”
Morris’s production is not a psychological revelation, in the manner of Ivo van Hove’s tremendous, stripped-back staging of A View From the Bridge. Yet it has its own frankness and drive. This is robust Miller: clear, sometimes remorseless in emphasis, moving to the thriller beat of a courtroom drama. Robert Innes Hopkins has created an alluring design, perching the Puritan settlement in front of a glowingly lit wood: the sort of bosky place in which you might catch traditional witches cavorting.
Crucially, some of the audience are seated on stage. Morris’s production ingeniously stresses the process of judging. As the accused are called to account, the lights go up in the auditorium and the spectators are tacitly co-opted as unofficial jurors. Confronted with a swaying line of shrieking accusers, and with a crime that is called “invisible”, everyone is likely to feel the chill of recent false testimony. The evidence-free hounding of Paul Gambaccini seems very close.
Strong stuff, but not quite all-inclusive in its sympathies. The Crucible
is a play in which women are fundamentally either holy or hysterical. They are moral fodder for a man’s dilemma. This production, not short but not flagging, goes some way to redressing this. The most inflected performances are female: from Neve McIntosh, Rona Morison and Kika Markham as wife, lover and wise woman. Some of the men falter. Dean Lennox Kelly is powerful and impressive as the agonised hero, but risks bombast. There is surely autobiography here: this play, praised for its politics, is also a personal investigation.
