Arthur Miller’s mighty drama of moral panic and persecution is perennially pertinent and as enduring as granite. Now, to mark the centenary of the playwright’s birth, it returns to the theatre where it had its 1954 UK premiere. Tom Morris’s revival has force and clarity, although it’s unevenly acted and the geometrical staging, while suggesting ritual formality, at times looks stiff.
Yet even in the opening hymn that inducts us into the play’s 17th-century Puritan community, there’s foreboding — a sense of the unknown and the uncontrollable lurking just beyond the lantern-lit edges of the familiar, and of the festering fear that brings the most awful of impulses right to the hearths and hearts of ordinary homes.
Robert Innes Hopkins’s design is nakedly adversarial, placing part of the audience in tiered on-stage seating, like a jury. Behind them lies a tangle of trees, lit hellfire-scarlet or lightning-white and lashed by the storm, real and metaphorical, that engulfs Salem. Jude Akuwudike as the Rev Parris is touched by self-regard and a hint of hysteria, tremulous at his inability to control his own household, let alone his parishioners, and only too eager to place his faith in Daniel Weyman’s zealous witchfinder Hale.
There’s shifting uncertainty, too, beneath the virile earthiness of Dean Lennox Kelly’s John Proctor, whose attraction to Rona Morison’s Abigail is potent and dangerous. Red-haired and milky-skinned, Morison is a fierce, pale flame; in the courtroom, with Jeffery Kissoon’s overly ponderous Deputy-Governor Danforth presiding, she piercingly locks her eyes on Proctor’s; when he publicly decries her as a whore she collapses, devastated, suddenly just a heartbroken girl in tears.
Also compelling are Neve McIntosh’s gaunt, wounded Elizabeth Proctor, Kika Markham as the elderly, appalled Elizabeth Nurse going to the gallows with a serene dignity, and Sara Powell as the sharp-witted Bajan slave Tituba, fighting to survive a society where she never had a hope of being anything other than an outsider and an object of suspicion. There are moments when Morris’s production falters, but the inexorable spiralling towards tragedy retains its timeless terror.
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