Arts
. . . toil and trouble
Peter Jenkins
The Crucible (Comedy The Greatest Little Whorehouse in Texas (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane) Arthur Miller's reputation as a superior melodramatist which, you may think, is no bad thing to be. His plays, for this reason, are held to be dated in a way that, say, Ibsen's social and political plays are not; they do not achieve the same sort of fusion between private and public, which is to say they do not go deep enough into character but rather skate across the topicality of the times.
I believe this view to be unfair to Miller. The superb revival of Death of a Salesman at the National recently showed that play not to have dated at all, indeed to have 'acquired with time a degree of universality'. I am not so sure about The Crucible, which I missed at the Cottesloe (although it was reviewed during my absence) and saw for the first time since 1958 at the Comedy where it has deservedly transferred. In 1958 I saw it done in the round in New York and in the aftermath of the McCarthy era — which was still reverberating on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, the Senator's home state, where I was a graduate student — the play seemed like an explicit parable and came over with enormous topical force. Now, if one wanted to write a play about McCarthyism one would write a play about McCarthyism and if one wanted to write a play about a 17th-century witchhunt one would be careful of narrowing its focus by too-pointed references to topical events.
With this in mind I was conscious for too much of Bill Bryden's production of the inadequacy of Miller's characterisation. I think I prefer the looser, expressionist form of Death of a Salesman to the hard-edged realism of The Crucible. The form was here, of course, dictated by his subject and his purpose but it exposes the writer's limita tions nonetheless. At least that was what I thought at first. For the whole of the first part, Acts One and Two, I was conscious of the McCarthyite allusions. 'Yes,' I was saying to myself, 'this is a brilliant pathology of a witch-hunt, a remarkable piece of socio-psychological analysis, but what is it that makes the Reverend Samuel Parris run and what sort of man is the Reverend John Hale — are these honest fools or evil charlatans?' These are the two least adequately-drawn characters in the play and Dave Hill's performance as Parris struck me as a piece of shallow acting in that it lacked the foundation of inner purpose, but perhaps through no fault of the actor. There are other such objections. We do not feel that we are told enough of John Proctor's feelings about his affair with Abigail and his wife's discovery of it, and if he strikes us as too good to be true it is because he is not complicated enough as a man, too simple to be a saint and martyr.
The play is such a gripping piece of work, however, that these objections are swept aside, especially as the production gathers pace in the second half. The court room scene in Act Three electrifies the theatre utterly. The play grows in strength for another reason, too; in the second half Salem takes over from McCarthy's America and even though the characters gain little in depth the play now goes deeper into human nature and social behaviour. As it rises above its contemporary allusions it acquires a more universal relevance, if only as a parable. It reminds us of how fanaticism can have small and fallible beginnings and soon become a forest fire of evil righteousness. It shows us the way in which societies become complicit in their own untruths and misdeeds to the point at which only the face-saving lie matters, the syndrome of systematic cover up. 'There is no higher judge under heaven than Proctor is,' says Miller in a reaffirmation of individual conscience which moves us because John Proctor, we know, is Everyman. The `Cottesloe Style', of which I am a fully-paid-up admirer, may on this occa sion, by piling realism upon realism, have over-emphasised the allegorical aspects of Miller's play and failed to make the most of what characterisation there is. It is a compelling production nonetheless with a long list of outstanding performances — Valerie Whittington, John Barrett, Gawn Grainger, Tony Haygarth, Trevor Ray and J.G. Devlin. Mark McManus as John Proctor was, I thought, a bit over-Biblical but, again, this may be the result of the shortcomings of Miller's characterisation rather than the direction or acting. Let me make plain tht I would not dwell upon these points were it not for the fact that The Crucible, at its own level, is quite riveting and to be seen at all costs. The idea that all women are whores or cingly, he has chosen to imphasise the that all whores are ladies runs through 17th and 18th-century English comedy and suppose we ought not to take exception to it when it is reworked for a country-andwestern-style musical set in Texas. The Greatest Little Whorehouse in Texas (fol' which I had no room last week) comes to London as a proven Broadway hit and Was warmly received when it opened at Drury Lane although I'm not sure that the somewhat camp first-night audience is the best judge of its taste in the treatment of women. The whorehouse in question is made out to be a kind of paradise for fallen women and the sort of place you might be pleased to send your daughter to. An element of satire may have been intended here but that is not how the audience took it at all and the moral reformer who in the end manages to close down this happy house was booed as if he were a Victorian stage villain. The Greatest Little Whorehouse is ri kind of soft-porn Oklahoma which should do for women what Amos 'n Andy did for the blacks. The singing and dancing is good and the music pleasant if not exactly memorable. As with the country-and" western idiom there's nothing sophisticated about this show. I can imagine it serving aS a good clean dirty night out for a businessman in from Kansas City or St Louis. Mee folks will like it here.
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