Set in the village of Salem, Massachusetts in 1691, the year before the witch trials that made it famous and which feature in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, The Good John Proctor presents a picture of the life of some of the young girls who will become the accusers in those proceedings.
It is not necessary to know the historical facts or Miller’s play to see how their strictly controlled lives, with their beatings, possible sexual abuse, childish fantasies, rumour and an obsession with evil, can lead to wrong ideas, but knowing the effect they would have gives this play weight and a context for the play’s final coda.
Betty Parris, ten-year-old daughter of the local pastor, and her orphaned twelve-year-old cousin, Abigail Williams, who lives with them, share household tasks and a bed and brief scenes alternate between them churning butter (and stealing a taste too), playing make-believe games and describing dreams. Neighbour Mercy Lewis, a little bit older, has already started work as a servant. She regales them with stories of evil being everywhere, even in the blood of Abigail’s baffling first period.
Then there is new arrival in Salem, seventeen-year-old Mary Warren, an epileptic whose late mother was a midwife and it seems something of a wise woman. She is dead, choked Mary says. Does that mean garrotted; had she been branded a witch as Mary herself would be? It is Mary who leads them into the wood where going was taboo, a place where the Devil could be lurking, the action which was to set the witch hunt in action.
The girls are played by adult actresses, but Sabrina Wu’s Betty is so convincingly wide-eyed, eager and guileless that she becomes the child and in interaction they all seem much younger, so that when Anna Fordham’s Abigail starts working for farmer John Proctor, her infatuation with the first man outside family she becomes close to isn’t surprising, though she may not understand what is happening.
In a world where something enjoyable seems always labelled as evil, both girls take Mercy’s scaremongering at face value. Her tales make life more interesting, and Amber Sylvia Edwards makes her so lively you want to believe her. Is she just playing games, consciously malicious or beginning to believe in things she’s invented? Mary Warren is an enigma. Lydia Larson makes her intriguingly different, but what is she leading the younger girls into and why?
Director Anna Ryder’s production in Natalie Johnson’s simple setting makes the scenes run smoothly on with the emphasis on the girls in the particular moment. It is dressed in period but the language is modern, including expletives in the mouths of girls who are shocked by those going bare-headed.
Miller’s play paralleled contemporary politics and the Macarthy witch-hunt against the Left. Here, a regime of religious dogmatism, strict discipline and keeping young women in ignorance with the potential for violence and sexual exploitation presented as precursor to the Salem trials is a reminder of the way women are still treated in some contemporary societies.