Arthur Miller wrote the crucible because at the time there was a witch-hunt going on in America called McCarthyism, The same terror, which paralysed Salem citizens in the spring of 1692, was paralysing the United States. Actors were replacing Salem citizens, Communists were replacing witches, and Danforth turned over his court to McCarthy and the HUAC. Blind men of equivalent stuff were again forging history. One plot made way to another. The play was written to prove how powerful Joe McCarthy was and also to show that its not right to judge somebody on what someone else has said about them because at the end of it all they could be lying.
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At first I thought the crucible was going to be quite boring and extremely hard to understand but as I read the play I found it very interesting and enjoyable. It also directly corresponds to the “witch-hunt” going on in the world today with the war and terrorist attacks.
In the play I played the part of Mrs Putnam she was a bitter and twisted woman of 45 whom had lost 7 of her 8 children and Ruth the one child she had left, who in the play was one of the many who conjured spirits, was cast under a power of darkness and was feared to be dying. I had a female role and thought having this role was considerably harder than having a female role because to play a male role you would just need to play a person of the opposite gender whereas to play a woman you had to act completely different as they were treated entirely different to nowadays, for example they had to wear long dresses and bonnets as it was thought to be sexual to show a bit of ankle or hair although nowadays girls wear next to nothing.
I feel my group did very well and that all of us pulled our weight and learnt our lines, it was also quite hard as the play is written in old English and at first was hard to read and understand but after we read through this a few times it soon became clearer and easier to play our parts, we also helped out anyone else in the class who found it that little bit harder to come to terms with. There were a few arguments within my group about things like who was who, why someone hadn’t learned their lines, why that person wasn’t in on this day and where we where supposed to be on set although all of these things were easily overcome after we remembered it was for our GCSE and we all wanted a reasonable grade and a good understanding of the play. We also had the added difficulty of having 11 people in our group and throughout act 1 pages 17-27 which was the part we had chosen only 10 characters appeared but we decided this wasn’t a problem and had a character swap with Parris as we all felt this was the largest part.
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I felt that doing the Crucible in drama helped me in English as we were also doing this, which gave me a head start because I had already read the whole play.
For the last part of our written coursework we have been asked to evaluate the other groups production. I think that the other group did well and enjoyed what they were doing but they also found it difficult to understand at first just like the rest of us. They had a few arguments between themselves as well about learning lines and stage directions; they to had to have a character swap as they chose the same part of the play as us although they chose to character swap with Abigail, they done this well and performed really strongly although some were stronger than others.
The Crucible is quite a hard play to understand when it is read the first time and took me a while to grasp all the factors brought about in this play, although this was a major problem at first I easily overcame it by reading it over.
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