Gotta say, Alison, that your theatre notes are not only full of subtle
responses, but often make me really want to get to Melbourne to catch
the damn plays!
Although maybe not this particular version... <g>
Doug
On 13-Sep-05, at 4:22 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
> 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
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
The temper is fragile
as apparently it wants to be,
wind on the ocean, trees
moving in wind and rain.
Robert Creeley
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