One of the landmark plays of the twentieth century, The Crucible is set in the late seventeenth century but plays like a drama from the Victorian era – specifically a weighty social drama by Henrik Ibsen. Miller famously seized upon the Salem witch trials of 1692 as a way of addressing the anti-Communist McCarthy hearings of his own time, but nonetheless he gives full weight to the complex social realities of the world he depicts. Whether the questions at the heart of the play are really the ones that would have been central to the early American settlers on whom his characters are based, however, is another matter.
It’s always salutary to revisit great plays such as this in performance and to be reminded why they have endured. This production, directed by Caitriona McLaughlin, is a showcase for the acting talents of students from the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts. As always with such productions, it takes a little while to adjust to a world in which everyone is aged between 20 and 35, but there are some great performances here and it’s pleasing to report that, in purely dramatic terms, the play still works. Act Three, in particular, gains a compelling dramatic momentum, holding the audience tightly in its grip.
The narrative begins just as a wave of mass hysteria is about to break over a small Puritan settlement in Massachusetts. The illicit night-time high jinks of a group of teenage girls have been discovered, and ringleader Abigail Williams decides that the best way to exonerate herself and her friends is to blame it on witchcraft. Others get in on the act, taking the opportunity to address old grievances or expand their real-estate portfolio. In an alarmingly short time half the town has been indicted, and in many cases condemned, for consorting with the devil in various unlikely – and sometimes rather comical – ways. At the heart of the drama is John Proctor, a good but far from spotless man (he and Abigail, his former servant, once gave in to lust in his barn) who must work to separate his principles from his prejudices in order to put forward a successful case against the madness engulfing his town. He enlists a star witness, but can she be relied upon in court?
The play is good at presenting what appears to modern audiences as blatant credulity and mania with a straight face: history records that these people really did believe these things (or act as if they did) and, in the context of some of the other things they believed, perhaps it wasn’t as ludicrous as all that. Miller also gives a consistent and convincing account of a shared and unquestioned moral code by which all these characters consent to be measured. There’s a particularly good moment in this production when in a last-ditch attempt to discredit Abigail, Proctor declares, “I have known her” and the disappointment in him is palpable – he has put himself beyond the pale with friends and enemies alike. One of the consequences of the excessive and repressive piety of the Puritans, it is also implied, is to render devil-worship appealing by comparison. Condemned to hang and with nothing left to gain from her earlier protestations of righteous faith, the slave Tituba invokes a devil who she is happy to accept as her ally, a “pleasure-man… singin’ and dancin”. The implication is that the more you insist on something, the more you risk opening the door to its exact opposite.
At the same time, it’s interesting to consider Proctor as a very twentieth-century protagonist. A defiant sceptic unwilling to concede to authority, he is clearly modelled to an extent on Miller himself, articulating his attitude to the prospect of testifying before the McCarthy committee. More broadly, it might also be said that there is something existentialist about this man who clings to his integrity while all around him seems absurd, and who ends the play dying for a principle he is not altogether sure has meaning or worth; I wondered at one point if he might have been a model for Berenger, the hero of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.
I thought I caught other twentieth-century echoes too. The tortuous and contradictory logic by which allies of Satan are identified – those who don’t confess only confirm their sin – put me in mind of the illogical bureaucracy of Kafka’s Trial. Meanwhile the moment at which Abigail turns on Deputy-Governor Danforth, her most high-ranking supporter, and seems about to overturn even his authority – “Let you beware, Mr Danforth” – seemed to me to reflect power dynamics reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. Finally, it might be worth acknowledging the extent to which this play might seem lacking in the wake of the second, third, fourth and fifth wave feminism which followed: in real life, Miller was largely angry at middle-aged men, but in his play the trouble is caused by pubescent girls, and the climax of his protagonist’s heroic struggle to make the truth known could uncharitably be thought of as a kind of ‘slut-shaming’.
McLaughlin skilfully choreographs the high-stakes drama as the tension accelerates, giving full definition to the tantalising moments at which it seems possible everything will turn out differently. Arian Nik, as Proctor, powerfully conveys both passion and doubt, and there are also strong performances from Chloe Knight as out-of-her-depth witness Mary Warren; Megan Llŷn as Proctor’s upright then humbled wife Elizabeth; and Samuel Ranger as an urbane but authoritative Danforth – former X Factor judge Louis Walsh, if he possessed the frame of reference, might describe him as ‘like a little Simon Russell Beale’. Ultimately, interesting as it may be to reflect on how far this play mirrors its own time more than the time in which it is set, this production works most emphatically as an assertion of the ongoing viability of The Crucible as compelling drama in the twenty-first century.
The Crucible is at the Arcola Theatre, London until the 19th of March 2016.