Arthur Miller's classic play 'The Crucible' highlighted the hysteria and paranoia of the McCarthy era, and serves as a warning for this generation too, writes Eileen Battersby
It was a play that had to be written. No doubt the same claim could be made for many plays, but The Crucible was and is different. Arthur Miller described it as "an act of desperation", his act of desperation. Most writers set out to make sense of the insanity that passes for human existence, but Miller wanted to go further; he wanted to confront it, explore it, and expose it in a contemporary as well as historical context.
Set in Salem in 1692, during the infamous "witch hunts", it is a drama in which a servant, having become involved with her master, is dismissed by the man's wife. The girl sets about a calculatedly vicious revenge. Religious fanaticism is another theme. Most of all, The Crucible is a study of fear at its most brutal and hypocritical.
In the canon of international theatre, The Crucible, in its sustained frenzy, occupies a secure position and is Miller's most frequently produced work.
For American theatre, it is the central text because it transcends the individual; society itself is under scrutiny. It is a play in which both the past and the present collide.
History is often uneasy territory. True, the witch hunts in 17th-century Salem could always be blamed on the prevailing influence of transplanted English Puritanism. That paranoia became all too American when a righteous opportunist, Senator Joe McCarthy, identified a scapegoat, communism, and beat it like a drum, pounding its divisive paranoid path into the American national psyche. Any lingering traces of old Europe were forgotten as American cultural life was incapacitated for a generation.
Miller's finest play, his only historical work, took him about a year to write, but it had an interestingly layered gestation in his consciousness.
He had initially read about the witchcraft trials in college. In Timebends: A Life, Miller's superb autobiography which was published in 1987, he recalled an incident surrounding The Hook, a screenplay he wrote about union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront. It was 1951 and Harry Cohn, the then head of Columbia Pictures, showed the script to the FBI. Miller was asked by Columbia to change the gangsters in the script into communists. In an article written for the New Yorker almost 50 years later, Miller reports "when I declined to commit this idiocy I got a wire from Cohn saying: 'The minute we try to make the script pro-American you pull out.' " The irony is manifold; particularly as Miller - a most American playwright, and the one who along with Tennessee Williams provided the bridge between Eugene O'Neill and the succeeding generation headed by Edward Albee and, ultimately, David Mamet - was staunchly American.
Miller's particular vision of social realism had been tempered by growing up during the Depression. It had influenced his attitude to life, just as the plays of Ibsen would shape his work. His awareness of events in Salem in the 1690s became consolidated into a personal urgency to write about them when he read "a two-volume, thousand-page study" of Salem's past as published in 1867 by the town's then mayor, Charles W Upham.
"I knew I had to write about the period," wrote Miller in that 1997 New Yorker essay, Why I Wrote The Crucible, which had been prompted by the then forthcoming screen version. "Upham had not only written a broad and thorough investigation of what was even then an almost lost chapter of Salem's past but opened up to me the details of personal relationships among the many participants in the tragedy." Elsewhere, in Timebends, Miller referred to another source, Marion Starkey's The Devil in Massachusetts.
Whatever about his reading, his strongest inspiration could well have come from his grasp of the prevailing irrationalism driving the witch hunts in Salem in 1692 and the similar hysteria that surfaced during the McCarthy era.
Miller first arrived in Salem on a wet day in 1952. Settling himself in the courthouse, he sat down to read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of 1692, "as taken down" he recalled in his New Yorker piece, "in primitive shorthand by ministers who were spelling each other. But there was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch hunt" - and the uncle of Abigail Williams, ringleader of the "witched" girls. Abigail had been dismissed by Elizabeth Proctor and Miller detected a hint of sexual transgression suggesting the servant girl had been sexually involved with Proctor's husband, John.
Salem's panic found its natural parallel in McCarthyism. Just as the 2004 film Good Night and Good Luck drew its audience back to the scaremongering career of the junior senator from Wisconsin, The Crucible acts as a parallel of sorts with the right-wing antics of George W Bush. International terrorism has supplanted communism as the prime fear.
Deputy Governor Danforth, the trial's judge, says "But you must understand, sir, that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time - we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God's grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it." There are no prizes for identifying it as a possible source of inspiration for Bush, or at least, for whoever writes the current president's speeches.
The political parallels are clear: 1950s Washington may have been mirrored in 1690s Salem, but now the rhetoric is reverberating as it is applied to events in Iraq and the wider war against terrorism.
Miller was brave, he was also angry, and disgusted with the way many of his contemporaries responded to McCarthyism. When Miller sent a completed manuscript of The Crucible to director Elia Kazan, who had co-operated with McCarthy and named names, Kazan's response was enthusiastic - he said he would be honoured to direct "such a powerful new work". The playwright is reported to have replied: "I didn't send it to you because I wanted you to direct it. I sent it to you because I want you to know what I think of stool pigeons."
The play is about more than ideology; it is tense, cohesive theatrical action. Sexual intrigue, with its attendant guilt, betrayal and revenge, is central. Miller detected the sexual undercurrent inherent in the court records of the time and used it to brilliant effect.
Sex for the Puritan mind was almost as close to the Devil's intentions as murder or theft. John Proctor is ashamed of his adultery and has rejected Abigail, who is now out of control. Meanwhile Elizabeth Proctor, the betrayed wife, is a study of sexual repression. Added to all of this is the power of fear and superstition confused with belief.
About the only false note is the cunning sophistication of Abigail's deception - after all, here is a young girl avenging the rejection she has suffered by exploiting the fears and superstitions of her community. Late in the play, she reveals the almost surreal depths of her resourcefulness as she directs the eyes of the court to a bird she claims is bewitched.
Abigail's opening encounter with her former lover is extraordinary as Miller pursues her eager final bid to retrieve their affair. "Give me a word, John. A soft word . . . I have seen you since she put me out; I have seen you nights."
The more he protests, the harder she insists. " . . . And I have seen you looking up, burning in your loneliness. Do you tell me you've never looked up at my window?"
Proctor's reply is inspired ambivalence: "I may have looked up." Just when she thinks she has won him back, he stands firm. "Wipe it out of mind," he insists. "We never touched."
Abigail: "Aye, but we did."
Proctor: "Aye, but we did not."
The erstwhile lovers are caught up in a drama heightened by the suspicions of his wife, Elizabeth. Then there is the presence of Tituba, the black slave woman Parris brought back with him from Barbados where he had been a merchant before turning to the ministry. Her skin marginalises her, but it is her knowledge of black magic which makes her dangerous.
"Tituba knows how to speak to the dead, Mr Parris," says Mrs Putnam. To which the despised Parris retorts: "Goody Ann, it is a formidable sin to conjure up the dead."
THE CRUCIBLE, WITH ITS atmosphere of fearful accusation, succeeds through its pace, Miller's use of superstition, belief, sexual power shifts and, above all, language. He acknowledged the liberating experience of adapting 17th-century New England English for his use in what is, for all its timelessness, a period play. The prose is almost Miltonic as it moves from the Biblical, to the legalistic, the colloquial and most richly to an earthy, lyric grace.
Wry, magisterial Danforth is among the strengths of the play. Exasperated by Elizabeth's refusal to cry about her husband's fate, he says "had I no other proof of your unnatural life, your dry eyes now would be sufficient evidence that you have delivered up your soul to Hell! A very ape would weep at such calamity!"
John Proctor is not a hero. He is, as Miller described him, "a damaged man" who rises above injustice and compromise.
Unlike Miller's other major plays, The Crucible looks at communal responses. Opening night, January 22nd, 1953 was not memorable. Communism and paranoia were still too potent outside the theatre. "Broadway audiences were not famous for loving history lessons, which is what they made of the play," Miller remarked.
More than 50 years later, it remains an iconic masterwork. Fear and paranoia are still on the prowl - as is human weakness. And a good production of The Crucible, one that fully harnesses its latent hysteria with all the fervour Miller intended, should leave one's nerves on edge, and our collective complacency that bit more shaky.
The Crucible opens at the Abbey on May 30
