NEWS ARCHIVE
THE CRUCIBLE

Why the Big Apple was ripe for Miller's return New York Diary
by Richard Eyre

Saturday March 16, 2002

I have been in New York for the past 10 weeks directing Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible. After 19 previews it had its opening night on March 7. They do things differently here: in London a play rehearses for a few weeks, plays perhaps a week of previews, and then opens with a press night, which is an awkward combination of gala and tribunal. Overdressed celebrities and well-wishers rub shoulders with conspicuously less showy critics who, eager to file their copy, rush toward the exits when the curtain falls as if their trousers were on fire. In New York, critics dribble in over four or five nights; there is less hysteria, and there is, on the face of it, less risk of a show's fate falling on a single throw of the dice.

However, the virtual monopoly of the New York Times ensures that only one critic really matters: a rather hesitant, pleasant man, who appears to have the sensibility of a teenage girl in the 1950s, which may make him perfectly suited to review Broadway theatre - Ben Brantley, formerly of Women's Wear Daily. In his review of The Crucible he is troubled by a "sweaty" production of a "sweaty" play.

Free of the inhibiting presence of critics, an opening night can become a shamelessly hyped-up showpiece, a photocall for celebrities with a play awkwardly sandwiched between their arrival and departure. But the importance of the opening of The Crucible - in its first Broadway production for nearly 50 years - ensures that at its opening, the play's the thing, though it doesn't hurt to have Liam Neeson and Laura Linney in the play and Harrison Ford and Sarah Jessica Parker in the audience, not to mention Arthur Miller.

"I'm 86 and I'm opening a play," says Miller with rueful wonder as we sit backstage at the end of the show. With the death of his wife of 40 years, the photographer Inge Morath, Miller has taken a battering recently, but when he appears on stage at the end of the show and the audience receives him and his play with unmodified rapture, he seems 20 years younger. "At least the play's still living," he says.

Inge was our rehearsal photographer and was working with us until two weeks before her death: watchful, sympathetic and unobtrusive, her small Leica cupped in her hand and raised only very occasionally to her eye. "When I learned to be a photographer, we only had a few rolls of film: I had to be selective." On her last day with us she deflected inquiries about her illness with a shrug, but was obviously in pain; her last photographs - of the last scene between John Proctor and his wife, Elizabeth - were beautifully composed but out of focus, as if blurred with tears. They must have been ours, for she would never have stooped to self-pity.

Everyone who sees The Crucible comments that the play is "timely". What do they mean exactly? That it's timeless. Currently the play resonates in two directions: on the one hand, the theocratic government under which the Puritan inhabitants of Salem lived had a sexual morality as rigid, and a punishment as cruel, as those of the Taliban; and on the other hand, the notion of a society in which all dissent is construed as opposition is not remote.

It was the "red scare" and the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 50s that inspired the play, but recent events in the US have an uncomfortable symmetry and have revived the play's topicality. After the introduction of the USA Patriot Act in November (which relaxes many of the rules that protect people suspected of crime from unfair investigation and prosecution) and the introduction of military tribunals, John Ashcroft, the attorney general, said that civil-rights activists who question or oppose the legislation are giving aid and comfort to the terrorists. "A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between," says the deputy governor, Danforth, in the play.

There are other uncomfortable resonances. "The axis of evil" is invoked by George Bush, the forces of "good" are lined up against the armies of Satan, the stars and stripes is displayed in shop windows, front yards, on car bonnets and jacket lapels, and God is asked to bless America on every street corner with at least the same insistence as the mullahs in the mosques. In many respects, the US is still a religious country with a strong streak of Christian fundamentalism, but the true religion of America is not Christianity: it is America itself. "This is a sharp time, a precise time," says Danforth. "We live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God's grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it."

There is (or was soon after what I have come to call "9-11") mob fear. There's a good example of this in the theatre world: a man telephoned a booking agency trying to get tickets for The Producers. Full, he was told, and was offered tickets for Kiss Me Kate. He accepted and meticulously questioned the booking agent: how big was the theatre, how far away were the seats from the stage, whereabouts exactly in the row? He gave his credit card details: an Arab surname. When he arrived at the theatre, he was met by four FBI agents and arrested as a suspected terrorist.

But to my surprise, after over two months in this city, I'm not surprised at this reaction. To a British ear perhaps "Ground Zero" seems self-dramatising, but in a city which has the People with Aids plaza, the Vietnam Veterans plaza and the Canyon of Heroes (the lower part of Broadway), it seems merely bleakly descriptive. In all New York taxis there is a "passenger information map" behind a scuffed celluloid cover: a cheery diagram of Manhattan that includes prominent landmarks such Madison Square Gardens, the Empire State Building, the Washington Square Monument, City Hall, all the bridges - and the World Trade Centre. In some taxis it has been scratched out by fingernails; in some, a crucifix has been superimposed over it; in one there's a sticker of a red rose.

Perhaps if I had stayed in London, I would have an unambiguous response, viewing all this as sentimental, hysterical, excessive. After all, I might have thought, having grown up in Britain after the war, I had been accustomed to looking at the devastation caused by bombing - blitzed terraces like mouthfuls of missing teeth and weed-infested wastelands like alopecia. And I might have thought I was inured to the legacy of terrorism from successive IRA and UDA attacks.

But I couldn't have thought that, after seeing the site where the twin towers stood, al-Qaida's largesse, Ground Zero indeed. Imagine an area that embraces the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Parliament Square and Downing Street. Imagine that those buildings and the people within them vanish - not razed to the ground but crumbled into a silt of rubble in a crater as deep as Vesuvius. And then imagine that you would feel indifferent to it.