The Crucible - National Theatre / NT Live Jan 23 / Gielgud

And Avanti is a sh**show for anyone hoping to travel to London for anything at the moment, whether on streike (most weekends) or just an ordinary weekday! I was hoping London's entertainment venues would join in in putting pressure on them to lose the franchise and renationalisation but I haven't noticed anything from that quarter. 

It will be NT Lived though so I'm looking forward to that. 

Any production of this play starts at a 4, for me - I don't care if it's in Mongolia with throat warblers, it's at least a 4. Imo, this production does Miller's text justice, as do the creatives and cast.

On the debit side, there are differing academic views on this though I do struggle to think there was a US accent in the late 1600s, let alone John Proctor's folksy twang that comes from regions of the continent not inhabited by Europeans during the period.

Also, I struggled with Abigail's persona. It's clearly an artistic choice but, even when alone with him, there was no trace of female guile about her to show us how/why John strayed from his righteous path. Tbh, from row D, I didn't really fathom Erin Doherty's Ketermine blankness, either.

A Hard Rain a-Gonna Fall was the only allusion I could reach for in relation to the effect though, given Rufus' form, it could be related to climate change .. though, I guess even Bob Dylan was referencing the Biblical flood.

I have no suggestions for how to tease out relevances to the current social and political sh1tshows without undermining the beauty of this work, and maybe you shouldn't (I don't believe Arthur Miller directly references the McCarthy hearings). But it's there if you scratch around; when the girls were doing their collective thing it looked a whole lot like Twitter to me - youthful, determined collectivism/group ID vs. the older Establishment (Mary Warren was interesting on group ID).

The Deputy Governor's shifting power game seemed at times like ex-Barrister Kier Starmer personified. I somehow weaved in the Forde Report on internal battles within the Labour Party, though some might feel that's a little over-egged .. There is something more clearly here about the transgender debate. IMO!

Good to see the National slowly self-righting after a turbulent period journeying to new post-Covid shores

4.5 throat warblings out of 5.

And this is exactly what the problem with this production is. You shouldn't be feeling like that at the end of this play, you should be feeling that at the beginning of the play and then have your empathy for Abigail melt away while the reverse happens with John's character. This production flubs that entirely because of some very odd directorial choices, performances and miscasting.

There were many times throughout when the words I was so familiar with did not match what I was seeing on stage and while I thought both leads 'acting' was on point, their characterizations were completely off or bungled by bad direction. 

My main problem with Brendan was his physicality and how he carried himself. He thunders onto the stage and waddles about arms bowed looking like he has just walked out of the gym on 'arm' day, looking for a fight. I have only ever seen John previously portrayed by thin framed, slightly geeky looking men and I think portraying him in any other way is a disservice to the character. He is meant to be an average weak but good man who makes some very bad choices, but who finally grows some balls when his legacy is at stake. He and his wife are meant to be the victims of this tale and more importantly, you are supposed to like him and I didn't like this John Proctor at all. He was a sulky, narcissistic 'Bro' baby, who constantly looked on the brink of roid-rage blaming everyone else for his own mistakes. Because of this there was little subtlety in the performance and no arc for the character, he was the same the whole way through the play. Also because of his size they had to cast 2 almost comically large nightclub bouncers as 'guards' as other wise he could've just Hulked out, took out the frail elderly gents who dealt out his punishment with one hand, grabbed his wife and kids, threw them over his shoulder and fled the town. There was literally no point that I felt sorry for this hulking boob of a mans plight or felt he was in any kind of danger and despite mostly enjoying Act 1, I couldn't wait for him to scream 'LET ME HAVE MY NAAAAAAME' because it would finally signal that the end was nigh. 

Someone above said they had forgotten Abigail was such a slight character who isn't in the play much, well yes in this version she is all but invisible, when she should be a cunning, manipulative hurricane of pure evil. In this production she is little more than a silent but deadly...you know where this is going...who plants a poisonous seed, and leaves everyone else to bring it to fruition. Things are not helped by the fact that in every one of her major scenes where her evil is meant to spew forth and we see what she truly is, we are instead 'treated' to a Sinead O'Connor B-side from her Celtic era which robs the character completely of it's potency and the story of its villain. This girl should have you quaking with fear in your seat! Here it feels more like the other children and the law are the evil manipulative ones, when she should feel like the ringleader who is strong arming them both. The fact that this component is missing makes it just look like everyone in the town is a complete idiot, as this Abigail doesn't even feel like she does anything wrong.

Maybe it is trying to be 'meta' and flip the material to emphasize the stupidity of the villagers and the era by putting the blame (maybe) rightly as you say on the adult who should've known better and less on the child who knew nothing and just fought back the only way she knew how. But if that is so, it really is a complete betrayal of the original text, this isn't Fatal Attraction.

This girl seduced Proctor and knew exactly what she was doing from Day 1 and throws a rather insidious tanty when her plans fail. She is also not just getting back at the Proctors, she is killing half the town. She is in no way a 'hero' of any sort. Removing the 'Trump' from the story lessens the impact of the material which on one hand is still completely relevant with todays political gaslighting and 'because I said so' Twitter politics. But no longer really rings true as far as people in criminal cases willing to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit (the Memphis 3, Michael Peterson) for freedom or their lives.

Is John Proctor's pride now just seen as a little silly, while Abigail's Trumpian gift of just walking away from the devastation she will cause wherever she goes Scott- free now a completely acceptable new normal?

That narrative may work for certain modern day 'movements', but for the sake of the rest of us, I really do hope not.

I haven't seen this yet, but we did it at school and I rewatched the Hytner-directed film version recently so it's fairly fresh in my mind, and I think the play is very 'problematic' in its misogyny. The witch craze was a mania lasting several centuries, killing as many as 60,000 to 100,000 people, and the victims were almost all women - an estimated 80% in Europe and the Americas. It's rather odd and sadly telling that the most famous 'artistic' take on this Holocaust-like period of murderous misogyny was written by a man (who was cheating on his wife at the time of writing) and has as its main villain a young girl (the historical Abigail was even younger) and main victim an adult man. I'm hoping this version addresses that somehow (I'll be watching the NT Live when it comes round).

Aye, aye, aye...

This play is not even remotely misogynistic unless you see the world through the very distorted lens of ALL men are bad and ALL women are good and neither is capable of being the other.

Was the era it was set in minsogynst, of course (the one we live in now ain't much better) and the same goes for the witch trials. But that is NOT what the play is about, it is using that era for a very specific purpose and turning it into anything else completely destroys the power of what the play is actually trying to say.

Abigail is a very bad person. A bad person is a bad person regardless of gender or age. This is main theme of the play, evil comes in all forms, human and societal. If you are only ever going to tie evil to a specific gender or group, yikes, life is going to take you on some very interesting twists and turns for you...

The play is about how ONE bad person (who in this case just happens to be a young woman) can use societal fears to manipulate people into getting what they want with disastrous consequences. If this makes someone a hero then I guess Donald Trump is a hero for using the same devices to win a presidency and then destroy an entire political system and the mental well being of 330 million people because he lost one. Are Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson heroes for doing the same to achieve Brexit? Or is it somehow different just because they are men? I'm sorry but to me it is all the same, manipulation to achieve ones goals without a single shred of empathy for the people you are destroying is exactly the same no matter what your gender is.

This is what the play is trying to teach us. Look out for people who may not be what they seem and shows us the manipulations they use to get us to do what they want. We have a million tv shows, films, plays, musicals, songs and real life experiences of BAD men, can we not just have one about a bad woman without turning it into something it isn't? Or do bad women simply not exist?

The fact that this production is leaving people who don't know the material with that option makes me hate it even more.

The main 'victims' of this play are all women who are already victims of the misogynistic time they live in and fake crimes they are accused of. They are all being killed off by a woman who is using that very same misogyny and belief system for her own gain. For me that makes her even more insidious. John is not the main victim here at all, his wife is. Abigail is trying to get his wife killed so she can take her place and she is doing so without conscience. She is manipulating and bullying a bunch of vulnerable children into killing a bunch of vulnerable women for her own gain. She is a manipulative psychopath who will stop at nothing to get what she wants and when she doesn't get that she simply walks away Scott-free and leaves everyone else to pick up the pieces.

John only becomes a victim because he does the right thing, but by the time that comes everyone in the town has become a victim. The men have all lost the women they loved. The children are all are left to explain things without a single shred of knowledge about what's really been done to them or what they have done. Failing to see or acknowledge what this person has done because you are swayed by the moral ambiguities of the time, her gender, other characters moral failures and modern political sensitivities, is doing a serious disservice to the play and what it is actually trying to say.

That for me would be the very definition of the word 'problematic' as is the implication that only men are capable of such despicable acts.

It's a work of fiction loosely based on an event, not a documentary.

He took a story and turned it into something else, that is hardly a crime or new.

The play is what it is and the meaning behind it is what it is and it doesn't need to be changed into something with a less powerful message than the one it already has. It shows the horrors of the Salem witch trials which were based on the existence of mythical evil where many innocents died and infuses it with a woman who is actually evil and walks away Scott-free. Not that much of a stretch to me and hardly misogynistic unless of course you find any criticism of women misogynistic. 

Miller's personal life is of no interest to me, I pay money to see his work not to sit there and cast aspersions as to how or why he wrote what is considered one of the greatest plays ever written.

If you have such a problem with this person why would you even want to see/support his work.

Anyways I've said my piece, not point harping on about it.

Enjoy hate watching The Crucible x

As I said before his personal life is of no interest to me, it is the play and it's subject matter that interests me.

Miller was far from a perfect man, though it must be said I struggle to think of a single skinny, quite unpleasant looking man with glasses that I know that would have passed up the opportunity of having an affair with Marilyn Monroe (yes I realize that is a misogynistic statement...but...facts) and he did marry her later on, it wasn't just an affair. His motivations behind writing the play were more to do with McCarthyism than hating on women and I don't think someone who writes such amazing plays that are as full of empathy for his characters as he does could possibly be a 'bad' person, no matter what mistakes he made in his personal life.

He believed based on certain events from the court documents that they actually had had a sexual relationship of some kind, though it was not revealed at the time. The changes in their ages is pretty self explanatory to me, no audience was going to find a sexual relationship between a 60 year old and a 9 year old palatable. Considering the storyline, you could hardly change the children's characters to boys as a bunch of teenage Warlocks frolicking naked in the woods was hardly going to work. The only way the play could possibly work is if the main protagonist was female, plus it also makes the story far more potent because not only is it a child doing it, but a female. This all falls into the paranoia of the McCarthy era where anyone could've been the one pointing the finger trying to save themselves and little to do with his personal life. I think he is far too intelligent emotionally and as a writer to do such things.

As the facts of the play stand, Abigail sent 40 innocent people to jail and 20 innocent women to the gallows based on a manipulative, vindictive lie and John Proctor had a very short affair with a 16 year old girl (when the age of consent was 12) while his wife was pregnant. He confessed to his wife immediately and then later to the courts and died for his sins, while Abigail walked away Scott-free. You can decide for yourself whose 'crimes' were the worst, but I know which sword I'm falling on here and it has nothing to do with their gender.

Adding modern day politics and slurs on the writers character into the equation is not going to change the facts of the piece or what it stands for.

I don't think I have to agree with all aspects of the MeToo movement to be considered a supporter of women rights. I also have many thoughts on the Prince Andrew situation that go far beyond simply 'hang the pedo'. Both are extremely complex situations that need to be be discussed in an adult and intelligent manner and honestly I still don't believe that has happened yet beyond the usual 'because I said so' Twitter politics. 

Though I highly doubt I'd fall anywhere near 100% on your Moms side

He didn't 'make it up'. There was a section in the court documents about an interaction between Proctor's wife and the child that led him to believe she'd had some kind of sexual relationship with the husband. 

'There was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch-hunt. “During the examination of Elizabeth Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam”—the two were “afflicted” teen-age accusers, and Abigail was Parris’s niece—“both made offer to strike at said Procter; but when Abigail’s hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up into a fist before, and came down exceeding lightly as it drew near to said Procter, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Procter’s hood very lightly. Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned. . . .”

In this remarkably observed gesture of a troubled young girl, I believed, a play became possible. Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigail’s mistress, and they had lived together in the same small house until Elizabeth fired the girl. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth. There was bad blood between the two women now. That Abigail started, in effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death with her touch, then stopped her hand, then went through with it, was quite suddenly the human center of all this turmoil.' 

Regardless it doesn't really matter, he needed a starting point for his play and that was what he decided on, it's his play and he can write what he wants to.

Twitter and whoever else wants to can say what you like, it doesn't mean its true. If I wanted to sure I could find that in there and without even looking very hard, but I don't believe that is the intention of the play or it's creation, it is a by product of looking at something from a completely different era. 

I would be very interested in seeing this lol

I came away not believing Abigail as the main anti-hero but I don't think it's fully the production's "fault".

- I have my modern idea of what is wrong and what is right
- I took interest in the real story and the official line is that that Abigail did not know the Proctors. Abigail is a small child in the real Salem.
- the play or real Abigail did not kill 40 people. The townspeople argued between themselves and accused each other. A child might have started it but adults did the rest.

There's an interesting essay online about revisiting it in the era of Me Too. Btw I would thoroughly recommend Norman Cohn's history series beginning 'The Pursuit of the Millennium'. The second, 'Europe's Inner Demons' deals more specifically with the witch craze, the third, 'Warrant for Genocide', with anti-semitism. Cohn was prompted to write on this field by his experience working in Intelligence in wartime, and stationed in postwar Vienna and interrogating Nazis and meeting refugees from Stalinism. The books are fascinating and very depressing in equal measure when you see these patterns in human behaviour over and over.