The Crucible: What Will We Hear?

While we’ve yet to have a crack at assessing Richard Armitage’s American accent in Into the Storm,  I think it’s fair to say that he’s especially adept at dialects. In  Hamlet, alone, he voiced about 30 characters, of which about 50% of those were in discrete dialects, and he rarely, if ever repeated  himself. His talent should prove especially noteworthy in his performance as John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s  The Crucible, because the dialects in the play are, at least to the playwright, an integral part of the work, and were one of the motivating factors, according to Miller, in his interest in selecting Salem as the focus of his witch hunt.

There were other enticements to me in the Salem period, however, most especially the chance offered to write in what to me was a practically new language -one that would require new muscles.

Arthur Miller, The Crucible in History, Massey Lecture, Harvard University, 1999 In fact, Miller also says that he might not even have written The Crucible had  not  the question of the language so powerfully drawn on me. He described the dialect as plain, craggy English, which he found was liberating  in a strangely sensuous way, with its swings from an almost legalistic precision to a wonderful metaphoric richness.

Miller got a taste of the language from reading some of the contemporaneous transcripts of the trial, taken down by various scribes, and recorded in a two volume history written and compiled by Charles Upham, Salem’s mayor, in 1867. Using the spelling of the scribes, Upham guessed at the pronunciation, such as corsely for coarsly, angury for angry and  a number of other words, which were then trisyllabic and are now disyllabic. Sounding the words out to see how they rolled off  his tongue, Miller began to get a grasp of the language, but ultimately,  to make the language his, he played with it, and also  resorted to help from a linguist.  He thought the dialect was a brogue with  a Scottish flavor, His aim was not to recreate the  archaic language of 17th century Massachusetts perfectly, but to create a new echo of it, which will freely flow off American actors’ tongues.

The dialect has been described as  a gnarled, densely packed language that suggested the country accents of hard people. Not so surprising then, that when Laurence Olivier staged The Crucible, he used the British Northumberland accent.

So, what can we expect from Yaël Farber and Richard Armitage at The Old Vic? Will some beloved Armitage character show up – Uhtred  or a likeness to John Thornton? Or will someone new and  American greet theatergoers? Whatever the choice, no one can do it better.