Writer: Kimberly Belflower
Director: Danya Taymor
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which premiered in 1953, may have been a dramatisation of 17th-century witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, but it was also a thinly veiled allegory of the contemporary anti-Communist witch hunts being undertaken by Joe McCarthy.
Since its publication, The Crucible has become a standard high school text. That forms the foundations of Kimberly Belflower’s play, in which a small group of English Literature students in a small town somewhere outside Atlanta, Georgia, are studying the text. The class teacher, Dónal Finn’s Carter Smith, is adamant that John Proctor, the principal male role in Miller’s play, is one of the greatest heroes in America’s modern literary canon. As the title of John Proctor is the Villain suggests, other interpretations abound.
Belflower’s work is set in 2018 at the height of the #MeToo movement, as the girls in the literature class decide to form a Feminist Club. And while some of the references in the girls’ discussions may feel a little on the nose – the reference to Tarana Burke’s first usage of the hashtag in 2006, in particular – the pace and tempo of the teenagers’ conversations largely feel believably sincere and urgent. That’s helped largely by hugely likeable performances from the young cast, especially Miya James as Raelynn, who is still feeling vulnerable about her best friend Shelby (Sadie Soverall) having slept with her boyfriend, Charlie Borg’s Lee.
As the class discusses The Crucible and is split into pairs to create their own five-minute responses, the dynamics between the girls and their attitudes to sex drive the narrative, both inviting comparisons with Miller’s characters and explicitly discussing the 1953 play’s sexual politics.
As one of the girls’ fathers is implicated in a sexual harassment scandal, and then as Shelby accuses Finn’s teacher, the other schoolchildren find themselves caught between the idea that women should always be believed and wanting to support the accused men, whom they know and consider to be friends. As in Miller’s play, girls making accusations have their motives and morals questioned.
Belflower’s dialogue does have a tendency to be too direct, laying out the connections between the characters of The Crucible and their corollaries in the modern-day small town in ways that already feel obvious from the performers’ and director’s hard work. But that directness helps us sit with the characters’ moral dilemmas and ambiguities. Just as the teenagers express their own cut-and-dried moral standpoints, they find themselves thrust into an adulthood that is murkier and messier.
That is all feels so raw and real, in no small part due to the performances of James and Soverall. Raelynn and Shelby are the crux of this powerful play and its reappraisal of Arthur Miller’s work. While The Crucible will doubtless continue to be taught in schools, one can only hope that the vital and compelling John Proctor is the Villain takes its place beside it in the curriculum.
Runs until 25 April 2026
