More Weight.'The Crucible' by Arthur Miller. State Theatre Company with Urban Myth Theatre Company. [review]

Abstract

The Crucible was first performed fifty years ago and repeatedly since, because it not only describes the exponential insanity of the McCarthy period but those numerous occasions before and since when a community is goaded into such insecurity that it turns on outsiders or minorities within its number.

State Theatre Company and director Rosalba Clemente can not have imagined how closely the themes and concerns of Miller’s play could be so congruent to current circumstances. The Crucible is a study of a religious fundamentalism that can recognise only the most extreme binaries, reducing even manifestly obvious commonsense to a distorted and distorting logic that creates hysteria in the grammar of language itself.