Arthur Miller's Creaky Potboiler

The version of The Crucible that opened last week at the Virginia Theater under the direction of Richard Eyre, former head of Britain's Royal National Theater, comes as close to being definitive as any production of The Crucible probably should. It has a swashbuckling, charismatic John Proctor (Liam Neeson), a nuanced and believable Elizabeth Proctor (Laura Linney) and an Abigail Williams (Angela Bettis) who plays the first scene with psychological realism and empathic dignity?something that, as far as I know, no actress has ever been encouraged to do. It also has a set that manages to be ingenious and sophisticated as well as beautiful. It consists entirely of a system of wooden frames and pulleys, whose planks and slats and beams slide or lean in and out depending on what metaphor designer Tim Hatley wants to evoke: the phobic darkness and constraint of ignorance, a vast domestic space in which an estranged couple seem doomed never to find each other, the walls of circumstance closing in on corrupt justice. In the closing moment, a grand, fantastic coup de theatre has the planks in the back wall break away to evoke Proctor's heroic drop through the floor of the gallows.

Some years ago, the brilliant director Nick Hytner, also British and also an alumnus of the classical repertory system, managed to turn out a not-too-shabby film version of The Crucible. It took a good deal of judicious cutting and rewriting, a lot of closeups and openings-out, but he managed to reconfigure the whole thing so that the final scenes are actually moving. I remember being astonished, the first time I saw the film, at feeling stirred by the ending. I think it's interesting that only Englishmen seem to be able to make any sort of human or dramatic sense of this play. Perhaps the reason lies in the British repertory tradition itself, which requires artistic directors and directors to be not only dusting off old warhorses but also, periodically, to be figuring out ways to breathe new life into lesser and often problematic works. If you're used to having to make Leontes' sudden excess of madness in A Winter's Tale play, or find a solution to the Milford-Haven sequences in Cymbeline, then the shabby inconsistencies of a John Proctor or an Abigail Williams must seem like child's play.

The fact is that neither of the two main figures Miller thought he was creating in The Crucible?characters he has endlessly described both in print and in countless self-worshipping interviews?corresponds in any real sense to a character he actually produced. He simply wasn't that good a writer. Miller was always driven more by a fascination with the idea of himself as a great playwright than with any of the things that give rise to great plays. He had no head for irony, no sympathy with ambiguity, no understanding of the concept of artifice. In the published text of the play, for instance, he describes Abigail as someone with "an endless capacity for dissembling," yet she is nothing of the sort. This is no Goneril or Regan, able to manipulate a father figure with a show of flattery or gratitude, or even a Mary Tilford, able to make herself seem vulnerable and childlike. "Do you grudge me my bed, Uncle?" she charges Parris with a typical lack of finesse. "I will not be spoken to so!" she informs the court, when her virtue is questioned. As written, Abigail has no visible guile at all. She is a schoolyard villain, blackmailing and threatening everyone around her.

The big flaw at the heart of The Crucible, though, is Miller's hero, John Proctor?the discrepancy between the man Miller imagined he was creating and the one he actually gave to the world?and it's a result of a lapse in moral understanding, not literary execution. John Proctor is a woman-batterer and sexual harasser. He screws the nanny and then lets his wife throw her out in the street because he feels guilty and ashamed. He slaps around teenage girls and bullies and browbeats them until he gets them to do what he wants. No matter that what he wants them to do happens to be, in Miller's view, noble. Miller seems to have thought that moral rage, in certain contexts (read McCarthyism), is justified no matter how it is expressed.

Here he is speaking of Proctor in a conversation Eyre quotes in the program:

A man like him would literally shrivel up and die if he found himself dragging other people into this nest of vipers. In a way, there's little choice for a guy like that, although the agony involved is tremendous. He has an idea of himself which is that of a leader of a sort, a moral example, perhaps, for others, so he's letting down a lot of people if he should accede to the committee.

Eyre points affectionately to the word "committee" as "a slip of the tongue," reminding us that it was Miller himself "who faced