The version of The Crucible that opened last week at the Virginia Theater under the direction of Richard Eyre, former head of Britain’s Royal National Theater, comes as close to being definitive as any production of the play probably should. It has a swashbuckling, charismatic John Proctor (Liam Neeson), a nuanced and believable Elizabeth Proctor (Laura Linney), and an Abigail Williams (Angela Bettis) who plays the first scene with psychological realism and empathic dignity—something that, as far as I know, no actress has ever been encouraged to do.
It also has a set that manages to be ingenious and sophisticated as well as beautiful. It consists entirely of a system of wooden frames and pulleys, whose planks and slats and beams slide or lean in and out depending on what metaphor designer Tim Hatley wants to evoke: the phobic darkness and constraint of ignorance, a vast domestic space in which an estranged couple seem doomed never to find each other, the walls of circumstance closing in on corrupt justice. In the closing moment, a grand, fantastic coup de theatre has the planks in the back wall break away to evoke Proctor’s heroic drop through the floor of the gallows.
Some years ago, another British director, Nicholas Hytner, also an alumnus of the classical repertory system, managed to turn out a not-too-shabby film version of The Crucible. It took a good deal of judicious cutting and rewriting, a lot of closeups and openings-out, but he managed to reconfigure the whole thing so that the final scenes are actually moving. I remember feeling astonished, the first time I saw the film, at being stirred by the ending.
I think it’s interesting that only Englishmen seem able to make any sort of human or dramatic sense of this play. Perhaps the reason lies in the British repertory tradition itself, which requires one not only to be dusting off old warhorses but also, to be periodically figuring out ways to breathe new life into lesser or problematic works. If you’re used to having to make Leontes’ sudden access of madness in A Winter’s Tale intelligible, or finding a solution to the Milford-Haven sequences in Cymbeline, then the shabby inconsistencies of a John Proctor or an Abigail Williams must seem like child’s play.
The fact is that neither of the two main figures Miller thought he was creating in The Crucible—characters he has endlessly described both in print and in countless self-worshipping interviews—corresponds in any real sense to a character he actually produced. He simply wasn’t that good a writer. Miller was always driven more by a fascination with the idea of himself as a great playwright than with any of the things that give rise to great plays. He had no head for irony, no sympathy with ambiguity, no understanding of the concept of artifice.
In the published text of the play, for instance, he describes Abigail as someone with “an endless capacity for dissembling,” yet she is nothing of the sort. This is no Messalina, no Becky Sharp or Eve Harrington, able to lie plausibly, disarm with flattery, or appear vulnerable and childlike. Abigail is endlessly confrontational. “Do you grudge me my bed, Uncle?” she asks Parris accusingly. “I will not be spoken to so!” she informs the court, when her virtue comes under fire. As written, Abigail has no visible guile at all. She is a schoolyard villain, blackmailing and threatening everyone around her.
The big flaw at the heart of The Crucible, though, is Miller’s hero, John Proctor—the discrepancy between the man Miller imagined he was creating and the one he actually gave to the world—and it’s a result of a lapse in moral understanding, not literary execution. John Proctor is a woman-batterer and sexual harasser. He screws the nanny and then lets his wife throw her out in the street because he feels guilty and ashamed. He slaps around teenage girls and bullies and browbeats them until he gets them to do what he wants. No matter that what he wants them to do happens to be, in Miller’s view, noble. Miller seems to have thought that moral rage, in certain contexts (read McCarthyism), is justified no matter how it is expressed.
Here he is speaking of Proctor in a conversation Eyre quotes in the program:
A man like him would literally shrivel up and die if he found himself dragging other people into this nest of vipers. In a way, there’s little choice for a guy like that, although the agony involved is tremendous. He has an idea of himself which is that of a leader of a sort, a moral example, perhaps, for others, so he’s letting down a lot of people if he should accede to the committee.
Eyre points affectionately to the word “committee” as “a slip of the tongue,” reminding us that it was Miller himself “who faced a committee—the House Un-American Activities Committee—some three years after he wrote The Crucible.” But the whole character of Proctor is a “slip of the tongue,” a great big goof that must keep Miller up nights, when he isn’t lying awake preening himself.
A man like that? A leader of a sort? A moral example? This is a man with no discernable sense of the free will of others or the danger he may be putting them in—unless, of course, they happen to belong to his own class. The trouble isn’t that Proctor sees nothing wrong with manhandling Mary Warren, of course, but that Miller, the self-styled moralist and man of enlightened letters, didn’t see anything wrong with it. He seems not to have even known he was creating a fundamentally exploitative and abusive hero.
It’s no good trying to argue that when Miller wrote the play such behavior wasn’t recognized as exploitative or abusive or that Proctor’s flaws are an aberration. Miller’s double standard just reflects the exclusionary mindset of the Old Left, which was fundamentally a boys’ club. (Women and homosexuals had no place there, no standing.) Besides, Shakespeare didn’t need a roadmap to distinguish noble from ignoble action. Neither did Euripides, Moliere, Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov, or a host of other dramatists who wrote before Miller and whose work touched on relations between people of unequal power or status.
Miller didn’t see any problem with Proctor pushing Mary Warren around because he was a superficial thinker. But it was being a lousy writer that led Miller to tart up the play with a marital-infidelity subplot. Miller himself invented the element of Proctor’s adultery, his sexual dalliance with Abigail. The real-life Abigail Williams was eleven years old and Proctor a man over sixty. Miller came close to ruining Death of a Salesman following the same dramaturgical impulse. A play wasn’t a play unless marital infidelity was somehow woven into the plot: hence the pivotal ten-o’clock revelation of Willy’s out-of-town mistress, who turns out to be the source of the mysterious bitterness between the tragic hero and his eldest son.
What a pity Miller’s instrument wasn’t more finely tuned to reality and less to the exigencies of the commercial theater. How much better both these plays would be if they didn’t hinge on adultery. How much more interesting would be a play about the Salem witch trials that looked for some deeper, more truthful explanation for the girls’ playacting. How much more interesting if the play had had the courage to grant Abigail a legitimate point of view, acknowledging that what she says about the hypocrisy of Puritan society is true, and that it goes for everyone—even the Proctors.
For years I’ve longed for a production of The Crucible brave enough to partly locate the girls’ motivation in something about the society around them—in the way they are treated and the way property ownership defines the rights and liberties of the folk in the pseudo-historical world Miller created, with its made-up dialect and judicial duties. (What’s a minister like Hale doing signing death warrants, anyway?)
For a while I thought that Eyre’s production might be going to do that, given the intelligence with which he has staged the opening scene—all that darkness and claustrophobia. (There’s a wonderful bit where Patrice Johnson, as Tituba, almost assaults Christopher Evan Welch’s Parris, spinning out her account of what the devil has been trying to make her do. It’s clear these are things Tituba herself would like to do, devil or no devil.) But Neeson is such a star that he can’t help making everything he does look glamorous and heroic—even bullying little girls. And there’s way too much bad acting going on—most notably from Welch, who always overacts, and from Brian Murray and Tom Aldredge at their hammiest—for us to take these characters seriously as representatives of an inherently unjust society.
In any case, I’m not all that sure the play is actable on any terms but those Miller intended. Neeson does wonders with all those sententious speeches. It’s a miracle he can make them sound like anything anyone would say. And Linney is uncannily affecting in what must surely be one of the most thankless roles with which a second-rate playwright ever saddled an actress. It’s interesting, vaguely, to see just how good you can make this play, which is not very. Eyre’s production manages to avoid the smugness and self-importance that tend to characterize American productions, showing that away from the avoirdupois of its subtext The Crucible is perhaps not quite as heinous a play as it’s seemed all these years (though it’s dishonest as hell), just a big creaky potboiler.