On Theatre Notes this week:
The Crucible
The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Directed by Anne Thompson and William
Henderson. The Eleventh Hour, 170 Leicester St, Fitzroy, until October 1.
It was not only the rise of McCarthyism that moved me, but something which
seemed much more weird and mysterious. It was the fact that a political,
objective, knowledgeable campaign from the far Right was capable of creating
not only a terror, but a new subjective reality, a veritable mystique which
was gradually assuming even a holy resonance...the astonishment was produced
by my knowledge, which I could not give up, that the terror in these people
was being knowingly planned and consciously engineered, and yet that all
they knew was terror. That so interior and subjective an emotion could have
been so manifestly created from without was a marvel to me. It underlies
every word in The Crucible.
Arthur Miller
Miller could be writing about contemporary America: a consciously engineered
terror which attains a "holy" mystique, where dissent against the ruling
powers attains the status of blasphemy. The Crucible premiered in the US in
1953, but its political insight strikes fresh sparks in the age of the
Global War on Terror (or GSAVE - the Global Struggle Against Violent
Extremism - for those who missed the changing of the acronyms). If ever
there were a play for our times, The Crucible is it.
It also happens to be a personal favourite of mine. With Death of a Salesman
and A View from a Bridge ,The Crucible shows Miller at the height of his
dramatic powers, in fruitful agonistic struggle with theatrical aesthetic
and form. He was not yet America's Great Playwright, and the urge to
didacticism - always strong in Miller - had not yet gained the upper hand.
Here is passion tempered by formal intelligence, ideological critique
informed by intuitions of human contradiction and frailty. These plays
exemplify the very best of the American liberal tradition.
The timeliness of The Eleventh Hour's decision to stage Miller's masterpiece
(for it may be fairly called that, especially if, following Randall Jarrell,
one thinks of a masterpiece as a work of art with "something wrong with it")
is therefore praiseworthy. But it must be said that the company's treatment
of the text is utterly baffling.
Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
All the best
Alison
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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