by Mark Lawson
Reader Review: Always cast in authority parts because of his height, Ned had played Judge Hawthorne, state instrument of injustice, in a school production. The play had also been one of Dee and Phee’s A-level set-texts and his copy of Miller: Plays One, a black-jacketed Methuen paperback with an abstract painting by the author’s daughter, Rebecca, on the cover, had white striations on its spine from frequently being cracked and held open – The Crucible was in the middle of the volume – while impatiently helping them to write essays on whether or not John Proctor was a hero, a process complicated by the fact that the girls were constitutionally required to come to opposite conclusions. He had seen all the major stage revivals – most recently, in the final weeks of his previous life, a version by a South African director at the Old Vic – and the movie adaptation with Daniel Day-Lewis, who married Rebecca Miller as a result, playing Proctor.
Among the texts about reputational destruction, this was the one that Ned knew best; and so he assumed that he had understood it. But only now, re-reading it while on police bail and academic suspension, did he truly comprehend the moment when Proctor refuses to sign the false confession that he has seen the women with the devil: ‘Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! … How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name.’
A hand raised from the book was not quick enough to stop a teardrop joining the blotches of coffee and ketchup (whatever home tuition he did on access nights was during supper time) on the pages of the play. And, if bile did not rise from deeper in the body than tears, then that liquid might have stained the paper as well when Proctor, appalled by the court’s apparent willingness to believe anything said by the women, asks the court: ‘Is the accuser always holy now?’
He was struck again that part of the power of the play comes from John Proctor being – like the whistle-blowing Dr Stockmann in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Miller’s inspiration – an imperfect representative of rightness. He has not committed the crimes of witchcraft for which the court tries to force an admission but he is guilty of something: adultery with a teenage servant girl.
Miller makes it clear that Proctor shouldn’t die for that, although admits in an afterword to having raised the age of the accusatory ex-mistress Abigail to seventeen, when her historical model was much younger. The dramatist may have helped his prospects with posterity by disguising Proctor’s paedophilia, or the play could now be banned in twenty-first-century Britain and America.
And, even so, there might be theatre-goers these days who concluded that the farmer deserved to go to the stake for seducing an employee half his age, regardless of whether he had been trafficking with witches.
In other circumstances and places, there grew up new Salems.
TBOTS – Ch 3, Dr 1
Savonarola’s rise was helped by a revolution in communication: the introduction of the printing press in the 1460s allowed prophets and moralizers to reach a mass audience for the first time. A Florentine convent began to print pamphlets of apocalyptic predictions and hell-fire condemnations that were sold on the street to the literate and told in the market squares to the illiterate by itinerant actors. And, while some of Savonarola’s disciples in the contemporary community of historians seek to outlaw contemporary parallels with past events, it is striking that our current festival of moral condemnation – the bonfire of the sanities – was enabled and exacerbated by the biggest change in the dissemination of ideas since the ability to print – digital interaction.
A Better Person
After the scandal began, people would frequently express to Ned variations of the sentiment: ‘Nobody would want to go through this but you’ll find you come out of it a better person.’ Or, more egotistically: ‘I know you’ll come through this a better person.’ (A version of the personal guarantee he had heard people give to victims of cancer: ‘I know you’ll beat this thing,’ a curious formula in which dying would rank as damaging the credibility of a friend.)
Until it was put to him in this way, it had never occurred to Ned that professional ruin and public disgrace might be a route to self-improvement. In one way, the thought was supportive, as it worked on the assumption that he was innocent and would be cleared; surely even the most constitutionally optimistic or Christian of his acquaintances could not think that his personality would be enhanced by a jail term for rape.
As it became an increasingly regular suggestion that being suspended and becoming a defendant might somehow make him nicer, Ned even began to expect, and to examine himself for, signs of his soul’s progress.
The more he reflected on the question, however, it became clear to him that he had not become a better person, but a far worse one. The clearest evidence of this was that, for the first time in his life, he found himself regularly fantasizing about the sudden – and, ideally, painless, although, if there had to be pain, so be it – deaths of the people who were doing this to him.
The Theatre of False Accusation
Officially a tourist in Edinburgh, he kept a notebook in his raincoat pocket in case of ever being required to write about the final summer of the United Kingdom. Ned had at first turned down the trip, until Tom cannily persuaded him that an historian of British politics had a duty to see Scotland in the run-up to the independence referendum.
Ned had been to the city three times, never happily. As a student in 1973, he had directed a cut-down version of Macbird, Barbara Garson’s satirical conflation of Macbeth and Lyndon Johnson, in a double bill with MacHeath, his own translation of The Threepenny Opera to the administration of Edward Heath. The script, though, deteriorated after the promising spot of the similarity in the names of the highwayman Macheath and the prime minister and, regardless of the order in which they performed the plays, most of the audience failed to come back for the second. On many nights, they passed the Festival test of whether a show should go ahead – more people in the auditorium than on stage – only through clumps of supportive friends or relatives of the company.
Steered from theatre towards academia by this failure, Ned had next taken the north-east train – with its breathtaking coastal coda when the carriages seem at risk of toppling into the sea – to be interviewed for a lecturer post at the University. On the return journey, he chose a seat on the left of the aisle to watch the splash and dazzle of the waves again. But, after suffering a second rejection by Edinburgh – though in kinder terms than the Scotsman review of his productions – he had stayed away, even irritating his publishers by declining invitations from the literary festival, until 2005, when Dee, who had inevitably proved to be the more theatrical of his daughters, appeared with the Leeds University Drama Society in a version of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle which Ned had feared was unlikely to be an original choice and proved to be one of seven stagings in the Fringe programme. Four of them unfortunately were performed by companies starting with a letter higher in the alphabet than L, putting Dee and her friends at a further disadvantage with browsers.
So, when Tom called during the July of their joint infamy, and said, ‘Up for a cultural weekend in Edinburgh, Nod?’ he replied: ‘No.’
‘Oh, why?’
‘Never been a lucky city for me. Gave me the bum’s rush as a theatre director and a teacher. It just doesn’t feel like the summer to go to unlucky places.’
‘Becca’s taking a play up.’
‘Really? Which one?’
‘The Crucible.’
‘Christ!’
‘Yeah, I know. It’s like Daggers going to see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or Savlon Dumb and Dumber.’
Ned feared that this Miller play might be as over-represented in the schedule as Dee’s Brecht but the difference was that you could probably never have too many productions of The Crucible. Even that didn’t budge his refusal. But, when he mentioned the turned-down excursion to Emma, she forcefully pointed out that they were having no holiday that year; it was a condition of Ned’s bail that he could no
t leave the country and he was terrified of being recognized in Cornwall. And Becca, she added, was his goddaughter, which duties he ignored almost completely apart from birthday presents bought and sent by Emma, who was not even the godmother.
So Toby was dispatched to his mother’s parents for four days. The lure of his beloved train journey was overcome for Ned by horror at the prospect of sitting for almost five hours in proximity with people who might know who he was. So they drove north in Emma’s Land-Rover, with the Pimms added to the insurance for four days. The always organized and organizing Helen WhatsApp-ed a roster, dividing the driving into quarters, but Emma took both Marriott-Humpage turns because the newest of Ned’s neuroses was an inability to understand how it was possible to be at the wheel of a car without killing everyone in it and possibly all those on the road.
Phobic as well about being known in hotels, Ned had lastminute.com-ed a self-catering apartment in Palmerston Place, close to the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Museum. Throughout their stay, days and nights of movie-force storms lashed the city, until the street bands on the Royal Mile tired of the irony of striking up ‘Singing in the Rain’ for the tourists in their wind-rattled rainwear. But a bright blue cagoule, the hood tied tight to show only an oval of face, proved more reliably obscuring than the usual baseball cap.
Waterproofed like a North Sea trawlerman, Ned passed as just an anonymous member of a tribe terrified by rain, as he stood with Emma, Tom and Helen outside an Episcopalian church in the Old Town. The city’s numerous religious denominations compensated for declining contributions to the collection plate by renting out their premises for August to theatre groups; a deal that suited both parties except when certain content – Judas, say, betraying Jesus due to a gay triangle involving Simon Peter – was declared blasphemous by a local councillor or columnist.
As they waited in a queue of respectable length for the previous show – Savile: The Musical! – to end, they could hear, from some of the huddles of rainwear, American accents. These tourists, bewildered by choice, had presumably reduced the risk by choosing something they had seen or studied.
Inside the church hall, unsteady wooden chairs had been arranged in several lines of ten. Almost two-thirds were occupied, although mainly by couples of around the right age to be parents of cast-members. Ned remembered from four decades before the company’s elation at occasionally playing to a ticketbuyer who was not related to an actor. Because of the extra legroom, Ned took an aisle seat with, their usual formation in theatres and on planes, Helen beside him, then Emma and Tom.
The cast all wore blue jeans, topped by bright white blouses for the women, contrasting with the men’s black polo necks. The only variations to these costumes were an English judicial wig of ridged wool for Judge Hawthorne, plain wooden crucifixes hanging round the necks of Reverend Parris and Reverend Hale, and an American cop’s gun holster in the belt of the Marshal. Between scenes, the music from the descent into hell from Don Giovanni played with heavy reverb from speakers. This setting invoked less seventeenth-century Massachusetts than late-twentieth-century Royal Shakespeare Company. During the climactic scene of hysteria, the scheming, screaming girls pulled mobiles from their pockets and began to tweet and text.
As the play’s situation already had depressingly endless relevance, this attempt at universality seemed unnecessary, especially for Ned and Tom, for whom the action was biographical rather than historical. But even so, and though trimmed to seventy-five minutes because slots in every venue were compressed to maximize revenue, the play retained its power.
Becky Pimm was Abigail Williams, who leads the charge of witchcraft. She and the others cast as accusers had the advantage of portraying an age close to their own, while the students playing the Proctors had to double their years and the actor cast as Giles Corey to multiply by four.
Despite choosing neutral dress and setting, the director curiously seemed to have demanded period regional accents and, to Ned’s godpaternal pride, Becky’s was among the best approximations of the nasal honk. She was also chillingly convincing in the scene where Abigail claims to be seeing Satan as a yellow bird in the eaves of the courtroom.
The phrases that had most affected Ned on the page were even more devastating in performance. When Proctor, a stocky Asian man with a beginner’s beard, began the speech, If she is innocent? Why do you never wonder if Parris be innocent, or Abigail?, Ned knew what was coming next, but the line still stung like a knife slicing the cheek, and, on the word holy, he sensed Emma turning to look at him and Helen twisting in her husband’s direction.
Towards the end, when Deputy Governor Danforth, his vigorous pacing releasing a cloud of the talcum powder used to blanch the student performer’s hair, asked Proctor why he refused to sign the confession, Ned, although pledging not to cry, had failed before the reply arrived and, when it came, had to cough and sneeze in the hope of passing off his emotion as allergies. ‘Are you okay?’ Helen whispered. He noticed that she did not touch his arm or squeeze his hand. Ned braced himself for the calamitous impact when Corey’s last words of defiance were reported but the lines had been cut, either simply for running time or because the director was too young to understand heroic sacrifice.
After a last roar of Mozart’s condemnatory score over a tableau of Proctor being led to the gallows, the snap blackout was followed by the over-emphatic applause of friends and relatives, punctuated by youthful whoops and whistles that Ned attributed to lovers and siblings of the cast. Touchingly, Becky blushed as she took her bow, then did a double-take at some booing from the audience.
‘I hope they were jeering the lying bitch’ – those words shushed by Helen – ‘not Becks,’ Tom said as they were leaving.
‘I’ve seen it happen to Iago,’ Ned told them. ‘Some people treat every play like a pantomime now.’
During the shuffling exit from the room, rainwater spilling on the floor as coats were shrugged on, Ned kept his head ducked but was convinced that at least three people spotted him and then looked away. After Ned and Emma had carefully complimented Tom and Helen on their daughter’s performance, they discussed the play.
‘I’m afraid I see all things through the prism of my predicament now,’ said Tom. ‘An inquiry into W & S, or witchcraft and supernaturalism, with Abigail as the main complainant and Danforth the Director of History.’
Outside, the weather continued to permit Ned hooded anonymity. When Becky came out, her face streaked orange and white from cold cream smeared over make-up, they exchanged hugs and her mother’s worry that the actress would get cold without a coat.
‘Just what we needed – a bit of escapism,’ Tom said.
‘Oh, Dads.’
‘Wow, Ned,’ added Becky. ‘You look like you’ve been blubbing?’
‘What? Oh, no. Scottish pollen. No immunity. I’ve hardly ever been here.’
Becky deflected their enthusiastic capsule reviews: ‘I only got it because I’m a midget and look about fourteen. If they’d cast me as Lizzie Proctor, we’d probably have had a visit from Operation …’
A paedophilia joke from the rehearsal room, Ned supposed. One aspect of notoriety was things said by enemies, but another was the sentences that friends desperately cut off.
A Sex Act
Even with the assistance of pills, Ned woke most nights, his thoughts pin-balling, three or so hours after going to sleep. Which, on the Saturday night in Edinburgh, was 4am. They had taken Becky, Judge Hawthorne (who seemed to be her boyfriend), Elizabeth Proctor and Deputy Governor Danforth to an upmarket burger joint on George Street.
Terrified of the judgemental suspicion of strangers, Ned had tried to avoid the outing, citing flu-like symptoms, which Emma, suddenly a citizen physician, possibly punishing his earlier explanation for wet eyes, attributed to allergies and directed him to the anti-histamine in his shoulder bag.
In fact, Becky’s friends appeared to be unaware of either Ned’s fame or infamy. The incuriosity of students about the news, infur
iating to him as an educator, was welcome as a defendant. When he proved familiar with the play – more so than Mrs Proctor, who was apparently under the impression that it had been written at the time of the events in Salem – Danforth asked him, possibly opportunistically, if he were a theatre director, responding to Ned’s confession of teaching by asking what he taught and, when the answer was history, grimacing. The students, he concluded, had agreed to tolerate oldster conversation with people who were not even their parents in exchange for food better than they would otherwise get.
He had become used to lying awake beside the sleeping Emma but, this time, to his surprise, she was awake, reading by the long summer light American galleys of a crime novel she was trying to sell in Britain. From what she said when she started it in bed that morning, Your Love Always was one of those techno-domestic suspense stories: two days after burying his wife, a man starts getting texts that seem to be from her.
‘You …’ He gargled away some night and wine gunge. ‘You okay?’
‘The rain on the window. It’s like Toby’s bloody drum kit. You were fine tonight.’
‘Yes. But I couldn’t have known that in advance. I could equally have turned up to find all of them wearing No Means No fleeces. I was a beneficiary of their solipsism. Genghis Khan could have eaten a cheese burger in peace among that lot.’
‘Anyway, I don’t think people are as obsessed as …’
‘Obsessed?’
‘Not obsessed. As aware as you are.’