Arthur Miller’s play used the Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthy-era hysteria but it is masterful, and elastic, enough to accommodate a host of modern-day parables. That is not what we see here. Lyndsey Turner’s production keeps it in its original context and the play feels like a handsomely raised period piece.
Beautifully staged, it is an almost entirely faithful interpretation and feels safe for it. Where its world might have borne more resonances to the group-think and scapegoating that recent populist narratives have peddled, its faithfulness pushes its themes back to the past, to Puritan fundamentalism, a time of theocracy and the search for a New Jerusalem, without bringing anything substantially new or imaginative to the stage – other than its aesthetics.
