We live no longer in the dusky afternoon

 “Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.”
- Oliver Goldsmith

And so to the theatre. This time it is 'The Crucible', undeniably a classic and equally undeniably very long and very heavy, in a new production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. The play was of course written by Arthur Miller as a response to the McCarthy show trials at which he and many others had suffered in the, er, land of the free. Current attempts in the UK to improve our human rights by taking them away shows that one can never assume that any society is immune from political repression.

The man was a genius

My own inability, a result of centuries of rational scepticism (1), to empathise with a belief  in god let alone witches rather prevented me from emotional involvement with the characters. As Bertrand Russell wrote "I would never die for my beliefs, because I might be wrong". I remember a similar problem when reading Herman Hesse's 'The Glass Bead Game' with the spurious mathematics obscuring for me the anti-oppression message. Perhaps a simple soul like me needs the directness of Brecht.


(1) And I am well aware that people continue to be executed for sorcery in, for example, Saudi Arabia; a practice and a country which I think rather prove my point.