FORWARD TO THE CRUCIBLE
(published Sept 2001)
BY RICHARD EYRE

If you grew up, as I did, in a farming community in the West of England in the 1950�s, you were insulated from almost everything except nature.  British forces were bombing Egyptians in Suez in an attempt to keep open their artery to a vanishing empire, Russian tanks were shelling Hungarian dissidents in Budapest streets and Senator Joe McCarthy�s House Un-American Activities Committee was threatening, castigating and imprisoning Americans for the crime of thinking differently.  These events were inexplicable activities that took place in far away places of which I knew little.  They were as remote to me as, well, the theatre.

In spite of never having been in a theatre, I wanted to act in one, or at least I wanted the gift of fluency, glamour and adulation.  I began to read plays and by chance � or at least at the instigation of one of my teachers � cam e across a play that had been presented in England a few years earlier:  The Crucible.  What attracted me then about the play is what attracts me now:  a hero who was a hero, a narrative which rolls like a spring tide towards its inexorable climax, and the depiction of a community, recognizable to me even as a schoolboy, in which orthodoxy could be righteous oppression and opposition to it seen as willful malevolence.

Like most boys of my age much of my reading was about the war � by which I mean World War II.  The war was fresh enough for me to feel that I had been a vicarious part of it:  after all, it provided the basic grammar for my parent�s lives, and their memories would up and regulated my emotional clock.  I fell on memoirs of battle commanders (whose war was emphatically in the first person), coming-of-age novels, trials and torture of secret agents, POW escaped, spy sagas and, most compelling, stories in which �ordinary� Germans found it in themselves to act heroically � hiding Jews, refusing to join the Party � and, like John Proctor, found meaning in their life in bringing on their death.

When faced with the choice between self-respect and self-preservation, John Proctor displays a nobility of spirit that we would all envy.  It takes awesome courage to say �No� when the consequence is death, but even to dissent from the will of the majority at school, at work, in politics, even in the family, takes a determined nerve that evades most of us.  One of the purposes of fiction must be to oblige us to confront the moral choices in life that we avoid my luck or by cowardice, as Arthur Miller puts it, �the stuff that you didn�t dare or want to look at before.�  Questions like these:  Could I have behaved better?  Would I have behaved worse?  Am I capable of betraying my country, my friends, my family?

When I was making a TV program about 20^th century theatre I spoke to Arthur Miller about the play and he said this of Proctor:

�A man like him would literally shrivel up and die if he found himself dragging other people into this nest of vipers.  In a way, there�s little choice for a guy like that, although the agony involved is tremendous.  He has an idea of himself which is that of a leader of a sort, a moral example, perhaps for others, so he�s letting down a lot of people if he should accede to the committee.�

The mention of the �committee� was a slip of the tongue, for John Proctor was facing a court.  It was Arthur Miller who faced a committee � the House Un-American Activities Committee � some three years after he wrote The Crucible.  Under threat of imprisonment and blacklisting, he refused to name the friends and acquaintances who might have had some association, however faint, with left-wing activities and the Communist Party.

Miller�s heroes, however, are not intellectuals; they are salesman, dockers, policemen, farmers, who seek salvation by asserting their singularity, by redeeming their �names� even at the cost of their lives.  Willy Loman cries out �I am not a dime a dozen, I am Willy Loman�!�;  Eddie Carbone in View From The Bridge, broken and destroyed by sexual guilt and public shame, bellows: �I want my name�;  and Proctor, in refusing the calumny of condemning his fellow citizens, declaims �How may I live without my name?  I have given you my soul; leave me my name!�

Your �name� is your self, and its preciousness is the preoccupation of Shakespeare as much as of Arthur Miller.  No writer is fool enough to imitate Shakespeare, it�s enough to be inspired by him;  but the epic scale of The Crucible, the yoking together of public and private worlds, the sense of a whole society set on the stage are, in a word, Shakespearean:

�You know what I used to do years ago?  I would take any of Shakespeare�s plays and simply copy them.  Pretending that I was him, you see.  You know, it�s a marvelous exercise.  Just copy the speeches, and you gradually realize the concision, the packing together of experience, which is hard to do just with your ear, but if you have to work it with a pen or a piece of paper and you see that stuff coming together in that intense inner connection of sound and meaning.  It�s exhausting, just the thought of it.�

Something of that diligence as well as immersion in the transcripts of the trials, led to Miller�s coinage of a language that is a marvelous blend of 17^th C biblical cadences, pastoral poetry, regional English dialect and muscular theatrical rhetoric.  Like Shakespeare�s language, it has the power to embody myth.  The Crucible, engendered by specific events in America in the 1950�s, doesn�t get its oxygen from the year of its birth:  like a timeless myth, it thrives across the boundaries of history and geography, culture and race, a story that is accessible as much in Lagos and Beijing as in Los Angeles and New York.

I did a production of The Crucible in Edinburgh in 1969.  It was seen by a party of schoolboys whose class I later visited to discuss the play.  About twenty five years later I met one of the boys who had been present, who talked of the impression that the play had made on him.  He said it had woken him up to the latent tyranny of a repressive society and the dangers incurred in dissent, and it made him want to become an actor.  But he became a politician:  his name is Tony Blair.