A tragic love story set amidst a backdrop of witch-hunting and a community turning on itself, The Crucible was written as an indictment of McCarthyism yet has had reverberations in East Java recently.
The play questions good and evil; righteousness; honour and love; and parochialism. My choice to “asianise” this production is both practical and conceptual.
Practical because I wanted to use the many talented and accomplished local actors, and conceptual because the relevance of this play to what happened in East Java is stark. The play
also warns any community, like Singapore, which believes it has some sort of moral high-
ground, that the same thing could happen again. Too often we have seen communities attempting righteous cleansing processes — and it seems we never learn from our mistakes.
My casting of the judges is intended as an indictment of the Western powers who have the
arrogance to believe that they may police and arbitrate the problems of the world, according to
their own doctrines.
Ultimately, the play examines the soul, and I hope that this will rise above the politics of the
piece.
– Lim Kay Siu (Director)
