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.
This it does partly by harnessing the tropes of horror films. Caroline Shaw’s cheesily churchy music and Tim Lutkin’s gothic lighting enfold a bleached-out chorus of accusers. When mouthy Abigail (Milly Alcock) steps forward to make her claims, or agonised Mary (Nia Towle) stands alone to testify for the truth, we see them for what they are: ordinary people flawed by petty jealousies and frustrations. But together, and encouraged by a corrupt establishment, they are like a Stephen King takeover of Twitter.
At the centre of it all is John Proctor. It is hard today to give the moral high ground to a married man who has seduced a teenage servant while his wife had postnatal depression, but Brian Gleeson is the man for the job: he is charismatic while radiating a self-lacerating decency. There is drama and depth in the restoration of faith between him and his wronged wife, Elizabeth, a dignified but emotionally remote Caitlin FitzGerald.
Part of Proctor’s story is that he is an immigrant, whose struggles to tame the land makes him vulnerable to all sorts of venalities (such as ploughing on the Lord’s day). An array of accents underlines the point that this is a recently formed community, with colonial hierarchies, jostlings and betrayals, and a streak of Irishness that is comically centred on Karl Johnson’s litigious Giles Corey. The biggest betrayal, of course, is by those with power, for whom truth is a political inconvenience. Now there’s a familiar story, intelligently told.
At the Gielgud theatre, London, until 2 September
