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.