![]() ![]() So to Lyndsey (Under Milk Wood, Top Girls) Turner’s revival of The Crucible. The authorities prosecuted with impunity, and nobody walked away free and innocent. You were also more likely to be charged with witchcraft if you were the object of envy -powerful or monied, say - or if you expressed scepticism about the workings of the court: thereby offering a chance for twisted revenge and petty resentments to play out. The Salem arrests nearly always led to the accused confessing: if you didn’t admit your witchery, you were sent to the gallows. ![]() The play was Miller’s response to the paranoia and hysteria of post-war US politics, when Communists and suspected Commies were treated as devils in need of exorcism by senator Joe McCarthy and his like something Miller witnessed personally. The Crucible -which was first staged in New York in 1953 -was, as is well known, Arthur Miller’s partly-fictionalised story of the Salem witch trials: a quasi-allegorical play based on the story of the pre-adolescents’ denunciations that gripped Salem and which saw hundreds of townsfolk accused of witchcraft and sent to their deaths. ![]() When girls started yelping and convulsing and then went limp or rigid, witchcraft was diagnosed. ![]()
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