The Crucible Production History
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1996
The Crucible is Arthur Miller’s most frequently produced play, both at home and abroad. In his autobiography Timebends he says that he can usually tell what the country’s political situation is if it’s a hit – “It is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.”
The play was first performed at Wilmington, Delaware under the direction of Jed Harris and opened on 22 January 1953 at the Martin Beck Theater in New York.
Arthur Kennedy and Beatrice Straight played the Proctors with EG Marshall as the Reverend Hale. It won a Tony and the Donaldson Prize as most distinguished American drama of the year, although many audiences and critics greeted its theme frostily. Harris’s directorial style had, in Miller’s words, “cooled off a very hot play” by deliberately seeking an antithesis to the highly emotional style Elia Kazan had brought to the playwright’s previous success, Death of a Salesman.
When the two original leads left to take up film work, Miller himself re-directed the piece with Maureen Stapleton and EG Marshall now playing the Proctors. This was a much simplified version, done all in black in an unchanging white light.
That same year, 1953, saw the first production of the play on the continent. Miller was invited to attend the opening night at the Belgian National Theatre in Brussels by the Belgo-American Association, but since his leaving the country was deemed “not in the national interest”, the State Department refused permission for his passport to be renewed. As the first-night audience clamoured for the author, the American ambassador had to stand up and take the applause. When the imposture was discovered, the Belgian press had a field day, denouncing American policy in general and McCarthyism in particular. As an intriguing footnote to this incident, in 1978 Miller had the curious and ironic satisfaction of being applauded as he entered the American Embassy in Belgium to attend a function given in his honour – something that would have been unthinkable twenty-five years before.
In 1958 one of the first ever off-Broadway productions, directed by Paul Lubin, ran for two years at a theatre in the Martinique Hotel. A tense and passionate rendering by a largely young cast made the play much more effective than it had appeared before. Some critics claimed that Miller must have rewritten it: he hadn’t, of course, all that had changed were the times. With McCarthyism on the wane, it was now acceptable to concede the damage that mass hysteria and unreason can cause if allowed to go unchecked.
There were two productions in England in the fifties: in 1954 at the Bristol Old Vic and 1956 at the Royal Court, but in 1965 it became the first American play to be performed at the National Theatre. This revival, which opened on 19 January under the direction of Laurence Olivier, was adjudged by Miller to be the best staging he had seen to date. Colin Blakely and Joyce Redman starred, and the play was done in Northumberland dialect, an accent chosen to represent the “burred and rather Scottish speech” Miller felt he had detected in the original; court records.
In the late fifties a French film version appeared, directed by Raymond Rouleau with Simone Signoret and Yves Montand repeating their highly successful stage roles. (Again, Miller had been unable to attend the Paris opening due to a State Department travel ban.) Sartre’s screenplay inevitably cast a Marxist light on the play, blaming the class struggle for an outbreak of witchcraft, but as Miller points out, many of the victims were themselves landowners. The film also contained some Gallic howlers, like, for example, Catholic crosses hung on Puritan walls – an impossibility in late 17th-century Massachusetts.
On 4 May 1967 CBS produced a television version, specially adapted for the medium by Miller himself, with George C Scott and Colleen Dewhurst. Eleven years later the Belgian National Theatre, the first European venue to have put it on, staged a twenty-fifth anniversary production.
Still relevant through the years and across cultures, a 1980 production in Shanghai served as a metaphor for life under Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Many were disturbed at the uncanny similarities between the interrogations in the play and those used on the dissidents of the time. In 1986 the RSC toured The Crucible through several British cathedrals and town squares before playing it in English in Poland. There, it was supported by government figures whose presence tacitly urged continuing resistance to a dictatorship they were forced to serve.
One of the most curious incidents connected with the work occurred to Miller some time after the play first opened. He recalls that a student from Argentina, who had seen the play in Buenos Aires, met the author to tell him he was being physically manipulated from afar by his aunt who did not want him to have anything to do with girls. He had believed the Salemites on stage when they said they were controlled by witches, and would not accept Miller’s contention that in his opinion the girls had not been telling the truth. The boy eventually ended up in an asylum, his faith in his theory unshaken, leaving Miller intrigued and not a little alarmed to find this interpretation must have been in the play’s bones from the first, though he had never paid it any conscious heed.
With unfailing modesty, Miller has always felt that The Crucible succeeded as a play even if it had, in the first instance, failed as a commercial production. Moreover it has, he says, been produced “more successfully the more time elapses from the headline ‘McCarthyism’ which it was supposed to be ‘about’.”
PS
If I was writing this piece today I might also have mentioned the 1996 film version, directed by Nicholas Hytner. The top-flight cast included Winona Ryder as Abigail, who has always been one of my favourites (probably a bit of a handful on a date, but talk about eye-candy), alongside such legendary British names as Sir Paul Scofield (Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons) and Peter Vaughan (Genial Harry Grout in Porridge, and I defy anyone to slide a cigarette paper between the quality of those two performances). It also starred Daniel Day-Lewis as the doomed John (“it is my name!”) Proctor, who was very shortly to become Arthur Miller’s son-in-law following his marriage to the playwright’s daughter Rebecca. They met at an early screening and married on 13 November that year. Had I known, I might have sent them a card, but on that day I had my own little occasion to celebrate – at 6:20 that morning I had turned 41. I didn’t feel it, work and family life were going well, and as far as I knew, nobody had accused me of being a witch. I was on a roll.