![]() ![]() Before each scene, designer Es Devlin wraps the action behind a curtain of lit falling water, the beauty of that biblical torrent offset by bleak surrounding darkness. It’s not as if she reinvents the piece, it’s more that she refreshes it, honouring the specificity but banishing clutter and creating an understated yet awe-inspiring monumentalism. This, Lyndsey Turner’s gripping revival at the National magnificently manages to do. The key thing for any revival, though, is that it doesn’t feel too much like a lecture in disguise. ![]() It moves with the times, and it takes no specialist in ‘cancel culture’ to see why the play might speak with urgent force today. Still, even at the London premiere of the masterpiece in 1956, the critic Kenneth Tynan observed: “We can now judge not as an anti-McCarthyite tract but as a devouring study in mass hysteria”. In the juvenile-led spasm of denunciation and execution that seized Salem, Massachusetts in 1692-3, which saw hundreds accused of witchcraft and many townsfolk sent to the gallows, Miller found a chilling correlative – and quasi-allegory – for the career-wrecking zeal of Republican senator Joseph McCarthy and his kind. First staged in New York in 1953, The Crucible was – as is often noted – Arthur Miller’s response to the paranoia that swept post-war US politics, when Communists or those suspected of being so were treated as little less than devils in need of exorcism. ![]()
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