Witch-hunt on Delhi stage: NSD students to perform Arthur Miller’s text against McCarthyism

The plot, set in the town of Salem in Massachusetts in the late seventeenth century, revolves around the Salem witch trials, in which more than 200 people were accused of practising the devil’s magic and 20 were executed after a series of prosecutions in 1692-93.

Writing about his play in The New Yorker in 1996, Miller (1915-2005) described The Crucible as “an act of desperation”. Miller’s play is currently witnessing a resurgence – several world theatres such as the Globe Theatre and the Scottish Ballet have staged it this year as an act of protest against rising authoritarian tendencies in the world.

The play holds a mirror to several frightening social behaviours that seem all too familiar these days. The fires of the Salem witch hunt were fanned by baseless accusations, rumours, hysteria, and a climate of fear and xenophobia.

The Crucible being staged in New York City in 2016. (Photo: The New York Times)

At the centre of the story is a group of girls, who are seen dancing in a forest. Afraid of being accused of witchcraft, they accuse others, their neighbours and acquaintances, of occult practice. The allegations are without evidence, but the accused find themselves hounded. At the end of the play, the central character, a farmer named John Proctor, finds the courage to speak truth to power.

Miller wrote the play as a parable for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous “witch-hunt” of those suspected of being communists in the United States in the 1950s. Amitesh Grover, a member of the NSD faculty who is directing the production, said, “I was thinking about this play because of the kind of witch hunts that we’ve been seeing in our media. We have seen the media going after innocent people and accusing them falsely. Then, years later, we find out that there was actually no truth and no evidence against the people who were the victims of these media witch hunts.”

American playwright Arthur Miller at home in New York, in 1952. (Photo: The New York Times)

In his Director’s Note, Grover writes that in today’s hyperconnected and deeply divided world, witch-hunts continue under different names. “Rumour travels faster than fact; reputations are destroyed in seconds; and moral certainty, once again, becomes a tool of control. We have only changed the arena — the village square has turned into a digital feed, the gallows into a trending hashtag, and confessions into public spectacles of shame. This production asks: What happens to a people when fear becomes faith? When private desires and guilt disguise themselves as moral righteousness? When the act of speaking the truth becomes the most dangerous rebellion of all?”

The Crucible, Grover says, is about the nature of justice, and about an individual’s own conscience. At the time schools had moral science classes, “there was something called good and there was something called bad and the difference was to be learnt from childhood,” he says.

The set, Grover says, has been “modeled…on an oppressive amount of height… If walls are supposed to be only 10 feet tall in the play, we have made them around 16-17 feet. If normal doors are 7 feet high, our play has 12-foot high doors. The set is quite overpowering. It gets infected by lies, witchcraft, accusations, and fear…”.

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