The Crucible - @ the Gielgud Theatre August 2023

On Thursday evening there were murders of the most disturbing nature.

Or perhaps I should say 'natures' because I think Arthur Miller's play shows us evil of two kinds. I wonder if this is why the National Theatre production en-cages the cast with a veil of water, which falls like bars to secure spectator from stage.

When the lights dim, that wall dissolves and then nothing separates viewer from 17th Century Salem.

The story begins with small-town folk, guarding small-town sins. Characters emerge and morph from a slow, insipid narrative smoke.

I think this wickedness takes two forms and I wonder which you think would trouble you most.

a) The first is evil born of innocence. The escalation and assertion of a school girls' game.

It represents a white woman's crime which starts in victimhood but ends in the realisation that you can escape powerlessness by adopting the callousness of man's ways.

Only though, if you can disguise and outwardly deny this control. Only under the appeal of youth, beauty, and innocence can the user morbidly marvel at their strength and explore previously inaccessible corners of influence. The better choreographed, the more they entrance, and from here the narcissism of a pious, sultry American Beauty reigns.

There amidst Ann Putnam's 7 dead babies and the rest, hung, crushed, condemned at the violent movements of fair maidens, I think of Lucy Letby. Of Ghislaine Maxwell. Of this carnivorous, siren's nature to defile, and yet preserve a feminine face. To manipulate.

b) The second unholy display is, in contrast, unquiet, and more familiar to modern narratives.

It is of twisted patriarchal authority. A priest. A judge. Men in dresses and wigs who, when faced with truth, tremble for themselves before concealing it in a special darkness reserved for them by the state. Safe. They slaughter for arrogance. It is the indulgence of the ego-maniac. It's Wayne Couzens. Epstein. Henry the VIII.

The options are therefore:

a) To be deceived by beauty

OR

b) To be deceived by power

Does one hurt more than the other when both betray?

Notably, the two share in their absence of personal shame. Abigail Williams and Governor Danforth are in many senses one and the same.

Them, and then, the rest of Salem. Who survive either by joining the hunt or torturing themselves, toiling, against, under, breaking, sacrificing themselves for a morality they can no longer trace in their living, sweltering, transmuting town where shame only calls quietly, to the quiet, and which twists in the emptiness.

They can not win. The choice is reduced to whether they wish to sell their souls privately or publically and unlike their persecutors, pain arises because they have inner selves to save.

And that makes the Crucible an infuriating and confounding play. Without answers. Only evil forging its way.

And it is ossifying to see that Miller would have no trouble transcribing the context to the modern day.

Here then, I pose another question, about the role of the playwright to not only pose moral conundrums to its audience but to experiment with solutions that alleviate pain.

How might one write our way out of the Crucible in any meaningful way?

I think I would benefit from being able to envisage the options, practical and fanciful, which may still deliver us into the arms of grace.

This, because our social ills feed our planetary atrocities and the theatre may provide one of the few spaces to focus a room full of strangers for a moment on how to conjure up new natures, and how to release them from the stage.