Witch hunts and terror

Iain Glen and Elaine Cassidy star in The Crucible.

I doubt if anyone realises how seriously exciting contemporary theatre can be until they have seen Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

This allegoric masterpiece about the savage Salem witch trials and judicial hangings of 1692, from which Miller drew a trenchant parallel with the McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunts in Fifties America, left me all hot and high with pleasure again.

Time and circumstance have now invested the play with disturbing relevance for our age of terrorism and international anxiety.

Dominic Cooke's tense and ominous revival, which independent producers Thelma Holt and Bill Kenwright are set to transfer to London, makes the connections vividly clear.

The third act, with Iain Glen's superbly pained John Proctor owning up to adultery to help save his wife's life, with its anguish, teenage hysteria and judicial menace, would not disgrace a hectic soap opera on Channel 4.

Yet these emotional convolutions are precipitated by a sober struggle involving conscience and conformity, individualism and dissidence. The Crucible deals with a community of strict Puritans possessed by terror of witches.

Hysteria, accusations and rumours run wild. Religious leaders exploit these fears and acquire extreme powers. They make a mockery of justice as they use outrageous measures to prosecute and persecute the innocent.

Of course today international terrorists do pose dangerous, durable threats. Yet those liberally inclined will appreciate the analogy between Salem with its witch hunts and a post 9/11 America, where a religious fundamentalist president exploits dread of fresh outrages, creating in Guantanamo and other secret prisons places where suspected terrorists are left like witches in limbo.

"Witchcraft is an invisible crime. So who can be witness to it," asks James Laurenson's chillingly controlled maestro of the 1692 show trial, speaking in Alice in Wonderland terms that have a grim Guantanamo echo.

Cooke stages an ingenious prelude to the play that captures its governing mood of menace. In the midst of designer Hildegard Bechtler's set, with its cluster of bare, winter trees, Salem teenage girls wildly dance and sing as if more than half- possessed.

Ian Gelder's Reverend Parris arrives to snatch his erring daughter and bring her home. The set becomes a Puritan domestic interior, in the shape of an inverted V, where Parris's daughter falls into a stupor and girls start their hateful naming of witches. The campaign of terror begins, the innocent doomed by malicious accusers, whom Miller shows, are given absurd credence.

When Elaine Cassidy's insufficiently seductive and dangerous Abigail, still hankering for John Proctor after the end of the affair, accuses his wife of witchcraft, the scene is fatally set for disaster.

In the court room trial, Robert Bowman's Reverend Hale, who ought to be a powerful, humane antidote to Danforth, musters no more than embarrassed meekness, but Glen's Proctor electrifies the scene.

Great gulping cries of rage, grief and self-disgust burst out of him as he makes the first of his confessions and his wife, Helen Schlesinger's inappropriately cool and composed Elizabeth, realises with a small cry that she has inadvertently betrayed her husband.

When the couple meet again, after months of incarceration and torture, Cooke stages their ghastly reunion without melodramatic stress. Glen, a muted, staggering wreck of a man, faces his climactic, elemental struggle over whether to save his name or his life.

As if to symbolise his escape the set walls open up as he walks out of a scene, which like The Crucible itself, leaves you overwhelmed.

The Crucible

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