Seventy years after its premiere, Arthur Miller’s great witch-hunt drama comes doubly coiled in history: the first is the moral panic that convulsed a 17th-century New England town into believing that its own people were possessed by the devil. The second is the mid-century McCarthyite drive to exorcise red devils in the cold war United States. Both are somewhat clunkily laid out in the amended overture that opens Lyndsey Turner’s revival, a partially recast transfer from the National Theatre.
Miller’s play rings with the rhetoric of righteousness, deployed by and against the townspeople, after its teenage girls start to have mysterious fits. The challenge is to force us to connect it with the uncomfortable witch-hunting, truth-denying culture of our own times.
