First viewed : 12 April 1981
This was a full length ( apart from the authorial interjections ) adaptation of Arthur Miller's classic play about the Salem Witch Trials on BBC 1 with a ten minute break for the news half way through. We'd had a look at the play in English a year or so earlier but I don't think we finished it ; probably the teacher abandoned it because it was going above everybody's heads.
For those who aren't familiar with it, Miller's play was a fictionalised account of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 where a number of townsfolk in the early colony run on Puritan lines were hanged on the evidence of a number of hysterical young girls. Miller took the bare bones of the historical record and filled in the gaps to come up with a compelling human drama , altering one or two facts, notably the age of the villainess Abigail Williams to achieve this. He also intended that his audience make the connection between the groundless hysteria in Salem and the current McCarthy hearings. It's long and complex and certainly no barrel of laughs. There's no happy ending for any of the characters and most of them are seriously flawed such as the vengeful psychopath Abigail, the self-regarding hypocrite Parris, the adulterer John Proctor , cowardly Mary Warren and self-seeking Thomas Puttnam.
The BBC production was faithful to the period and strongly cast with stalwarts like Dennis Quilley as the despicable Parris, Peter Vaughan as inflexible Judge Hathorne and Daniel Massey, superb as Hale , the supposed expert on witchcraft desperately trying to get the genie he has helped unleash back in the bottle. Despite that, the strongest performances came from newcomers Michael N Harbour as Proctor the weak man driven to the end of his tether - "I have known her ! " - and Sarah Berger as the murderous Abigail. Berger was 20 or 21 at the time and you would have thought stardom was assured. That's not turned out to be the case although she's still a working actress with a long list of TV credits.
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