70 years ago, Miller invented an idiom that a multilingual community or European settlers in America might have used that still sounds fluid and evocative. The script is as precise as a machine there is nothing left even though it runs for three hours. In our era of fake news, any number of cult-truth deniers fit into the narrative. Miller used the historic Salem trials, in which young girls accused their elders of Satanism, as an allegory for McCarthy’s persecution of Hollywood liberals. Instead of the usual Puritan garb, the women in this American colony wear dresses in the Laura Ashley style, and the men wear blue and khaki work clothes that would not be out of place in a Shoreditch manufacturers’ market today.įair enough. It is presented on a stylized set by Es Devlin, a sloping platform reflected by an ominous cone of light overhead, fringed on three sides by sporadic curtains of rain and reverberating with religious chants. Australian actor Brendan Cowell is charismatic but oddly modern John Proctor, the decent but flawed man she desires and destroys. Erin Doherty, a wondrous actress who is still best known for playing the young Princess Anne in The Crown, is captivating as Abigail Williams, the girl whose scorned affection sparks a literal witch hunt in Massachusetts in 1692. Arthur Miller’s 1953 study of public disparagement and herd behavior feels renewed relevance in Lyndsey Turner’s staging.
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