COLIN  HILL, director, writes ...

My college dissertation, written back in the mists of time, was a comparison of the works of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, so you can see I have a long-held appreciation of  the great writers of 20th Century American plays and The Crucible is an especial favourite.

This is the GWT's third presentation of this great play and I hope we will live up to the standard set by those who have gone before us.

My cast is composed of some well-known performers and a few actors making their debuts on the Crayford stage. Current GWT regulars include David Webster, Alan Goodwin, Mary Gibson, Justine Greene, Ross Holland, Peter Lang, Roger Gollop and Maurice Tripp.  They are supported by rising stars Catherine Addy, Nikki Clark and Gemma Saunders as well as Company stalwarts John Turnbull, David Adams, Penny Walshe, David Hampton, Mark Baldwin and Viv McQuillan.  Our debutantes include Francesca Simmons playing Mary Warren and Abiola Akinpelu playing Tituba.  As John Proctor you will see Sam Oatley, returning to our stage for the first time since you saw him as one of the Darling boys in Peter Pan.

The need for young girls in the play gives us the perfect opportunity to employ the talents of some of our excellent Youth Group in a main production, so Hannah Holland, Jessica Baldwin, Ella Banks, Jade Hall and Katie Webster make the step up before, we hope, they resume their Youth Group activities when The Crucible is over. The production is in the assured hands of our Stage Manager Alan Peck and we have new talents to call on from Fiona Turner (lighting) and Matt Friett (set design).

The play is an intense, thought-provoking piece of classical theatre which is as relevant today as it was when it was written more than fifty years ago. The collective lunacy that led the citizens of Salem to turn on their own kind as a result of the mischief of young children is a warning that echoes down the generations and cautions us to beware of how we can ruin our lives when we fail to stop and consider the collective actions of so-called guardians of morality and belief.

I commend it to you and I look forward to sharing it with you in October.

Bill Bray introduces the man who probably needs no introduction

The extraordinary events of Arthur Miller's life gave him a high profile,  not merely for his writing, but probably with even more people, as a consequence of his 4-year marriage to Marilyn Monroe. There was also his subpoena by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. At the time there was public comment when his son by his third wife, Inge Morath, was put into residential care when diagnosed with Down's syndrome. (Rebecca, also from that marriage is a theatre director and married to Daniel Day Lewis.) 

Miller is the subject of a biography by Christopher Bigsby, who introduced the second volume (1962 - 2005) in August at this year’s Edinburgh Festival. There is a powerful autobiography, Timebends, which Miller dedicated to Inge Morath.

Most of his major plays, Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, A View from the Bridge, The Price and the opening play of our new season, The Crucible, were written in the 1940s and 50s. Most were directed by long-time friend and collaborator, Elia Kazan, but the friendship and collaboration broke when Kazan was called to testify by Senator Joe McCarthy's Committee and named people he alleged to have been members of the Communist Party of the USA. Not only did this fracture Miller's friendship with Kazan but sparked off his anti-witch-hunt play based on true events in Salem Massachusetts in 1692. 

Miller had less need to protect his career, but as a film and theatre director Kazan would not have survived a refusal to answer the HCUA's questions.  Miller never named names, but it is a speculation that his marriage to Monroe gave him an advantage when the US authorities threatened to withhold his passport. When she came to England to film The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, Miller was permitted to join her, although for the strictly limited period of six months.

Miller wrote The Misfits, a short story about cowboys, at the time he was getting a divorce from his first wife, and subsequently developed it as a screenplay with a role for Marilyn. In 1960 The Misfits was filmed with Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach. Marilyn’s unpredictability and waywardness caused such tensions between her and Miller that this was the final nail in the coffin of their marriage. 

Miller was a remarkable playwright, as will be demonstrated in this new production of The Crucible. Don't miss out! 

Are you, or have you ever been ...?

The Crucible was born out of a dark period in  American history.  The war was newly  won, but the peace was soon lost when the Soviet ally became the new enemy in the cold war, which dominated the international scene for the next forty years.  Arthur Miller likened the red-baiting of that time to the witch-hunts of  the New England Puritan communities of the late 17th Century.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) was formed in 1938 by the House of Representatives. From 1945 it concentrated on real or suspected communists in positions of influence in all aspects of US society and in 1947 it took a special interest in leftists in the Hollywood film industry.  Eventually over 300 directors, actors and screenwriters, who had been arraigned before the Committee were black-listed by the studios and most of them were never again able to work in the industry.

In 1956, Arthur Miller, who was known to have been a member of the US Communist Party, was subpoenaed by the HCUA and attended the hearing accompanied by Marilyn Monroe.  It may have been her presence and the media ballyhoo which  it attracted, that led the Committee to let off Miller relatively lightly. Although he refused to name other communists known to him, his sentence was a mild $500 fine or 30 days in prison.  Even this was overturned on a technicality two years later. However, he was black-listed and his passport was withdrawn. His exclusion by the studios lasted only a few years, during which time he concentrated on his stage writing.

In parallel with the HCUA there was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation. This concentrated on seeking out anybody with real or suspected communist sympathies in the government and army.  People hauled up before the senator were brow-beaten into naming names, and the accusations, often unsubstantiated, piled up, creating an atmosphere of sheer hysteria, reminiscent of the well-documented witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.  The temperature rose when, in 1950, a Soviet agent, Alger Hiss, was thought to have been unearthed in the upper echelons of the State Department. Fever heat was reached in 1953 when two communists, Joseph and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for espionage. It was not until the 1960s that the atmosphere cooled down and a more balanced view was taken of what became known as the era of McCarthyism.

Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953, when McCarthyism was at its height. The House and Senate committees had no real need to quiz intimidated witnesses about communists; the question, "Are you, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" was quite unnecessary.  The organisation had been so heavily infiltrated by FBI agents that every overt and covert member had a file. The aim was to punish reds and pinkos by threatening them with prison and unemployment, by forcing them through the humiliating process of naming names.  It was just like the witch trials in which simple people, most of them children, were encouraged to save their souls by  labelling witches and devil-worshippers.  9/11 ushered in another period of hysteria: the War on Terror, with "extraordinary rendition" and Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay. In the search for terrorists any method was legitimate.  Now most of the Guantanamo inmates have simply been released.

The message of The Crucible is an enduring one.