Demons within and without
Patrick Carnegy
The Crucible Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Women Beware Women Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
At its première just over 50 years ago, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was, at least in part, a sane man’s strike against America’s McCarthyite paranoia about communism. Miller’s cover for his protest was, of course, the infamous Salem witchhunts conducted by the New England Puritans in 1692. In resurrecting the play as its tribute to Miller, who died just over a year ago, the RSC is plainly aware that the piece is now tested against new terrors confronting the liberal world.
Extraordinary that Miller, four years after the play’s première, should have admitted that at the time of writing The Crucible he didn’t conceive ‘that there are people dedicated to evil in the world; that without their perverse example we should not know the good’. It almost seems as though he had to write the play in order to discover the Iago principle that, in Miller’s own words, ‘a dedication to evil ... is possible in human beings who appear agreeable and normal’ (as one knows Iago should seem in any half-decent production).
Precious few of the characters in the play can come across to anyone but themselves as ‘agreeable and normal’, but it’s plainly important that the evil endemic in the Salem witch-hunters should not for one moment be caricatured but be part and parcel of credible characters, as it indeed is in Dominic Cooke’s exceptionally fine and sensitive production. Resisting the rather obvious temptation to reset the play in the heartland of today’s bible-belt America, or in some other hotbed of religious zealotry, Cooke holds true to its historical period. When the play opens, he lets us see the ecstatic dancing of the young girls in the woods upon which Pastor Parris (Ian Gelder) stumbles, and which ignites the notion that the village is rife with demonic possession. Sexual frustration is plainly a contributory factor, but this is somewhat underplayed. From first to last the production leaves you wondering whether the girls are really possessed or simply shamming.
Through all this, the voice of incredulous reason is that of the village outsider farmer John Proctor, who recognises only the religion of seedtime and harvest. It is a powerful, compelling performance by Iain Glen. Proctor’s single big mistake has been to sleep with and then reject Parris’s niece Abigail Williams (Elaine Cassidy), whose revenge is her incitement of hysterical possession among the other girls.
There’s a deep irony in that the witchery hunted down by the exorcist Reverend Hale (Robert Bowman) and DeputyGovernor Danforth (James Laurenson) is to most intents and purposes masculine in origin. It certainly makes you wonder how the play would have come out if written by a woman, and how it might come across if directed by a woman. The central relationship between Proctor, his wife Elizabeth (Helen Schlesinger) and Abigail is beautifully handled. The great crucial scene, in which the shackled Proctor first consents to confess to demonic possession, and then realises that only his refusal of the lie, and consequent certain execution, has any chance of saving his wife, her unborn child and even the community, is almost unbearably moving.
At the very end, Cooke returns us to the edge of the primeval forest, but this time with the thought that Proctor’s self-sacrifice, in winning round at least one of the principal accusers, the Reverend Hale, holds out the promise of new life not only for Elizabeth and their child but also for the village as a whole. Miller’s optimism cannot but seem futile when measured against the militant religious fanaticism of the 21st century, but, for anyone still with ears and a heart and mind of their own, the play remains a deeply illuminating, passionately moral dramatisation of the unending battle between reason and madness.
In Thomas Middleton’s rarely performed Women Beware Women (c.1614) at the Swan, Penelope Wilton sails about the stage in gorgeous dresses, radiating lethal smiles. She plays Livia, a wealthy widow who’s seen off a couple of husbands and can stir up as much mischief as she likes. Merciless with the innocent younger women, she tricks one of them (Emma Cunniffe) into an incestuous liaison with her uncle and breaks up a pair of newlyweds (Hayley Atwell and Elliot Cowan) in order to furnish the Duke of Florence (a rather fidgety rendition by Tim PiggottSmith) with a mistress and herself with a rough-stuff lover from the lower orders.
In Laurence Boswell’s production, the play behaves like a comedy for most of the evening, then tumbles into a tragedy of barely discriminate revenge. In Websterian mode this involves a nuptial masque. Anyone not killed by the sight of Livia flying in as Juno is finished off by poison or a shaft from Cupid’s bow. An epilogue from a Cardinal berates the inevitable consequences of untramelled lust. Middelton’s play is a choice example of Jacobean hokum. It could perhaps have been treated a shade more seriously by Boswell, if only to render the bloody dénouement a touch or two less risible.
Previous page
