McCarthy continued his unfounded allegations about Communist infiltration, stirring up paranoia about “enemies within”, adding the US Army and the administration of President Harry S. Its particularly virulent and destructive voice was that of a Republican senator, Joseph McCarthy, who shot to fame in 1950 when he gave a provocative speech asserting that he had a list of members of the Communist Party and those in a spy ring – all employed by the State Department. The Red Scare, said Miller, “paralysed a generation”.
Get prepped for this exciting opening with our definitive guide to The Crucible. That was definitely the case when Ivo van Hove mounted his Broadway production in 2016, and now the National Theatre brings us their first major revival since 1990, directed by Lyndsey Turner and starring Erin Doherty, Brendan Cowell and Eileen Walsh. Revived numerous times over the decades, adapted for film, and analysed by countless students, it has become a seminal piece in theatre, and yet one that still shocks anew. One test of a truly great work of art is whether it continues to feel resonant, to tap into some universal truths that apply to our lives today – and Miller’s towering work absolutely does.
“Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say all that he believed.” “All the old political and moral reality had melted like a Dali watch,” recalled Miller of that late 1940s-1950s period. “ The Crucible was an act of desperation.” So wrote Arthur Miller in an essay for The New Yorker in 1996, as he reflected on the origins of his powerful play about the 17th-century Salem witch trials – an analogy for the contemporary horror of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror.
0 kommentar(er)
