Seven decades on and Arthur Miller's thriller based on the Salem Witch Trials still hits a pertinent nerve
Arthur Miller’s 1953 drama may be set in late 17th-century Massachusetts, but it’s no secret that he uses the Salem witch trials – which led to the imprisonment and even hanging of innocent men and women – as a metaphor for McCarthyism. The campaign of political repression named for the Senator who instigated it was ignited by fear of Communism spreading in the USA. So it is a telling Irony that Miller himself was convicted for contempt of Congress in 1956 for not naming names of others who shared his own condemnation of that paranoia.
By that time, though, the play had already achieved the Tony Award-winning success that has followed it ever since. The reasons are clear from the get-go in Ola Ince’s groundbreaking production. There is room on Amelia Jane Hankins’ spacious two-tiered set, with room for small domestic spaces dotted across it, to take in both the bed of a young girl, who is a contorted though motionless figure attended by her uncomprehending father, and the unbridled high spirits of teenagers dancing in the woods, igniting the self-righteous anger of their parents’ generation.
In this wide space (usually filled by the work of Shakespeare and his near contemporaries), the conflicted inhabitants of Salem seem all the more urgently real and natural. This is, of course, down to the excellent cast. They wear their convictions, relationships and costumes (cloaks, breeches and long, full modest skirts) with only a slightly enhanced naturalism.
It emerges that the bedridden girl is 10-year-old Betty (played touchingly by Scarlett Nunes), daughter of preacher Samuel Parris (excellent Gavin Drea). There have already been accusations of witchcraft made against some of Salem’s womenfolk that may be the cause of her affliction, for Parris himself is reeling from finding a posse of Salem’s young girls messing around in the woods, led by his niece Abigail (a vivid and unnerving Hannah Saxby). Accusations of naked dancing and devil worship are rife and Parris feels his position is threatened. The cast plays the paranoia of rumour, threat and counter accusation to the hilt and their fatal consequences of imprisonment and execution with conviction.
In the matter of rebuttals, it is Abigail who defends her position in a cloud of revenge. She successfully accuses Phoebe Pryce’s gentle though stalwart Elizabeth Proctor, the wife of farmer John Proctor, with whom she was having an illicit affair until he broke it off.
What was especially clear to me here was the plight of the Salem women. I felt for the first time seeing this production a real sympathy for Abigail. Although men too are accused and farmer John is clearly at risk from the start, it is of course women who are mostly likely to be charged with witchcraft. How he finds a sort of salvation in confession is actually as moving as it is shocking in Drea’s nuanced, moving performance. Race too plays its sinister part and Sarah Merrifield’s feisty Tituba the servant girl becomes an obvious target for Abigail’s allegations.
Miller’s play may be 70 years old and based on a story even older, but in the current world of he-said, she-said, political bias and online paranoia, The Crucible retains a shrewd significance.
By Judi Herman
Photos by Marc Brenner
The Crucible runs until Saturday 12 July. 7.30pm, 2pm (Tue, Thu & Sat only). From £5. Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1 9DT. shakespearesglobe.com